


IOU

by forthegreatergood



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Fluff, Friendship, Hand Jobs, Happy Ending, M/M, Misunderstandings, Mutual Pining, Oral Sex, Pining, Spy Shenanigans, slight au - nobody is Hydra and everything is fine, slight au - nobody thought it was a good idea to inject people with alien corpse-juice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-11
Updated: 2016-09-17
Packaged: 2018-08-14 13:31:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 50,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8015839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forthegreatergood/pseuds/forthegreatergood
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A sniper codenamed Hawkeye probably shouldn’t be so oblivious, and an agent who’s been called Fury’s one good eye probably shouldn’t have such a big blind spot.  It’s a good thing SHIELD is composed of responsible adults who’ve all got their acts together.</p><hr/><p>“We’re alone, right?” Clint asked.</p><p>“Yes.” Phil wondered what strange question or confession it was going to be this time.  Painkillers tended to make Clint ramble, removing the filter that kept him from voicing every stray observation, offbeat attempt at humor, or quietly-filed fact.  The last hospital stay had resulted in a prolonged talk with Steve about Johnny Cash lyrics and the unlikelihood of Clint ever having been to Reno, let alone having senselessly murdered a man there.</p><p>“Do you think--” Clint licked his lips and looked away, abruptly bashful.  When he glanced back at Phil, he seemed surprisingly earnest. “Is there any chance that I could maybe, um, ask you for a blowjob?”</p><p>Phil could practically hear the record-scratch of his brain refusing to understand the question.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> All characters property of Marvel.
> 
> With all possible gratitude to [mjolnir-s-master](http://mjolnir-s-master.tumblr.com/) for the beta-reading.

Phil flipped through the last few pages of the damage report. He was confident he could sign off on it, and, for all his quiet grumbling about Tony needing a new targeting system, he was actually rather pleased at the numbers. As Avengers-level emergencies went, it hadn’t been that bad. With the Hulk in play, and the size of the machines the team had been up against, the destruction could have been significantly worse.

The initial attack having involved an unoccupied building already slated for demolition had been pure luck, but, in his admittedly biased opinion, the secondary evac and containment teams had done an exemplary job clearing the area once the threat was registered. Skye might not have it in her to be a combat specialist, but she’d taken to damage-control like a duck to water. She’d fallen in behind Melinda, Bobbi, and Sharon like a seasoned pro.

The beacon drones Leo and Jemma had developed, with their full-spectrum scan capabilities and their built-in algorithms to identify dangerously compromised architecture, had already proved to be worth their weight in gold. The team had been able to route evacuees away from one building that had come down before the fight was over and clear a second building even before it began collapsing. As a result, civilian casualties had been minimal, with no reported deaths and only minor injuries. They’d done well, and thanks to their efforts, everyone had made it out more or less intact. Phil was proud of them.

He smiled to himself. Especially Skye. She’d come so far from the angry, impulsive loner he’d first met, back when she’d been living out of a van and trying to take on the world all by herself. And it hadn’t been a one-way street; training her seemed to have settled Bobbi back into routine SHIELD life more quickly than he’d have predicted. And he hadn’t seen Melinda so emotionally engaged, however grudgingly, with a team on active duty in decades. It was hard to look at Skye’s future now and not see great things instead of a jail cell.

Phil eyed the signature line. There was no reason not to sign it, and he knew it. But signing off on the report meant not having a particularly good excuse to be sitting here, in medical, next to Clint’s bed. He’d be loitering instead of gamely multitasking, no sheaf of papers to wave like a badge at anyone questioning his presence, no unspoken assumption to lean on that he was trying to keep the reports from proliferating by literally babysitting the people responsible for them. 

Not that people were in the habit of questioning him. The medical staff still came to him with updates about Avengers’ injuries instead of Sitwell, somehow under the assumption that Phil had been promoted instead of rotated out of the spotlight. He had the feeling that Jasper was actively encouraging the perception but had never been able to prove it.

Phil turned back to the first page of the first report--an overview with a brief description of events, a basic timeline, and the current assignation of responsibility--and went through it again, trying to pay slightly more attention than he had the third time, when his eyes had kept wandering to the bruises on Clint’s arm and face, the inflatable cast on Clint’s wrist, and the IV dripping its payload of fluids and painkillers into Clint’s veins. However sure Phil was of the report’s contents, it wouldn’t do to let an error slip through because of his own distraction.

Or because of his own fatigue. It was beginning to settle on him, stiffening his shoulders and hips and reminding him of his age, rekindling the nagging ache in his chest that the doctors assured him was nothing but scar tissue and the occasional attendant irritation, reminding him that he had a perfectly good bed in a perfectly good apartment a short cab-ride away. The Avengers weren’t his team anymore, and even if they were, no one would fault him for calling it a night. Clint wasn’t conscious enough to register either his presence or his absence.

Phil had tried not staying once. He’d gone back to his perfectly good home, eaten some perfectly good food, taken a perfectly good shower, scrubbed the dust and grit off his skin. He’d crawled into his perfectly good bed and proceeded to stare at his perfectly good ceiling until dawn, unable to shake the image of Steve sitting next to Sam’s bed, forlorn and miserable and alone. Phil preferred the crick in his neck that came from falling asleep in a chair to the gnawing guilt that had dogged him for days afterward. Enough coffee would spare him from either one, though. He got up and stretched.

“Looking good, sir,” Clint mumbled. “Nat?”

Phil let himself smile, just a little, before flattening it back out into his normal poker face and turning to the bed.

“Cleared and gone home.” Her injuries had barely justified the x-ray, but it paid to be careful. Once she’d seen him watching over Clint, she’d signed herself out and gone to bed. “She’ll be back in at first light to see you, I’m sure.”

Clint’s features crinkled with a dopey grin, and he gestured at his wrist.

“Sign my cast?” he asked, his voice thick.

“Let’s skip the lecture from the nurses and not,” Phil suggested. He suspected they were in for a lecture from the nurses no matter what, for the same reason he suspected that Clint was more zealously medicated than was strictly necessary: there were only so many times a patient could sneak out of a facility without waiting for discharge before the fight became preemptive.

Clint’s normally bright eyes were bleary, and he yawned and smacked his lips. He looked around for the water. “Can I--?”

Phil poured him a cup, hovered close while he drank it, and wasn’t fast enough to stop it when he spilled a third of it down his chest.

“Sorry,” Clint said, frowning. “Guess they’ve got me on the good stuff this time.”

“Yes, they do,” Phil agreed evenly. He grabbed a towel and started blotting at Clint, trying to mop up as much of the water as he could before it soaked into anything. The last thing he wanted was to precipitate a bedding or gown change that would inconvenience the nurses and aggravate Clint’s injuries. Phil was careful to keep his eyes down while he worked, to treat Clint like any other specialist in need of assistance, to keep the blush off his face. There’d been a time, once, when that hadn’t been quite so difficult. He knew there had been. He just couldn’t remember it now.

Clint’s uninjured hand closed around Phil’s wrist, firm and sudden, and he met Clint’s eyes, surprised. Had he hurt him? Phil had been trying to be gentle, to keep the pressure light. He hadn’t meant to make anything worse, certainly not to the point that Clint felt the need to physically stop him from doing so. But Clint’s expression was serene, and his grin had turned into something of a smirk, and Phil did his best to ignore the way Clint’s calluses felt against his skin. Phil tried to steady himself. It had always been easier to not see--to not think about--than it was to not feel. Fortunately, Clint didn’t touch him often. Unfortunately, Clint showed no sign of letting go. 

“So, I was thinking…” Clint blinked at him, then looked down at Phil’s hand. “Wow, you are _warm_.”

“No more so than usual, I expect,” Phil said. It sounded like a close approximation to his usual deadpan, for which he was grateful. Painkillers tended to make Clint ramble, removing the filter that kept him from voicing every stray observation, offbeat attempt at humor, or quietly-filed fact. Showing the cracks in a facade when he was like this tended to lead to very awkward conversations. Phil’s pulse quickened when the pad of Clint’s thumb began tracing a small circle over the inside of his wrist, and he carefully peeled Clint’s hand off his arm and deposited it on the mattress.

“We’re alone, right?” Clint asked, trying a different tack.

“Yes.” Phil wondered what strange question or confession it was going to be this time. The last one had resulted in a prolonged talk with Steve about Johnny Cash lyrics and the unlikelihood of Clint ever having been to Reno, let alone having senselessly murdered a man there.

“Do you think--” Clint licked his lips and looked away, abruptly bashful. When he glanced back at Phil, he seemed surprisingly earnest. “Is there any chance that I could maybe, um, ask you for a blowjob?”

Phil could practically hear the record-scratch of his brain refusing to understand the question. His mouth was already shaping a response, autopilot kicking in after so many years of coming up with pat answers to unbelievable situations.

“Barton, you’re under the influence of a very generous dose of medical-grade narcotics,” Phil pointed out. It seemed like a reasonable enough way to dodge the question. Clint wouldn’t be asking otherwise, Phil was sure. He’d previously shown little interest in men and absolutely none in Phil, and Clint’s romantic pursuit of female colleagues had run more toward flirtatious one-upmanship and good-natured ribbing than straightforward requests.

“I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” Clint said, his brows furrowing. “It’s morphine, not ecstasy.”

“You don’t think that might have something to do with you putting it out there, though?” Phil asked mildly. Thank whichever gods were listening that Clint never remembered these conversations, he thought.

“I think it’s more that I haven’t gotten laid in like two months, and you’re hot as hell,” Clint snorted, the grin sliding back across his lips as he gave Phil a slow once-over.

“That’s probably the most _unique_ compliment I’ve gotten from a subordinate in years, but--”

“I’m not, though,” Clint reminded him. He yawned. “’m an Avenger now. We’re not in your chain of command.”

“No, I suppose you’re not,” Phil said. He hadn’t let himself think of it in that light, hadn’t thought he had a reason to reconsider the possibility of approaching anyone who’d swapped out their specialist status for a slot on the Avengers. Natasha was the closest thing Phil had to a daughter, for all that she’d never had a chance to be a child, and Clint was…. 

Phil tried not to laugh at himself. Teasing him, obviously. Phil relaxed. There was some comfort in at least having realized it without involving anyone else, unlike poor Steve.

“There’s not really a reason to say no,” Clint continued. “You’re not my CO. I’m not seeing anyone, you’re not seeing anyone. I mean, if you _wanted_ to say no, if you weren’t interested, you’d flat-out say so, right? Like when you told Sitwell that having Tony’s bachelor party in Vegas was going to be an off-Broadway shitshow, and you weren’t going to get involved.”

Phil pursed his lips, unsure of how Clint had even heard about that. He’d had the conversation with Jasper behind closed doors precisely because he didn’t want to rain on anyone’s parade or influence attendance when Jasper inevitably went ahead with his plans anyway.

“Which it was, by the way.” Clint tried to spread his arms, then winced. “Completely amazing, but also a total shitshow.”

He reached for the water, and Phil obliged him, being more cautious of both spills and personal space this time. Clint took the opportunity to look up at him through his impossibly thick lashes, and Phil thought it was unfair that Clint, as old as he was, could still make it look appealing--the sweet promise of something more--instead of sad. Phil hadn’t even been out of college before it had stopped working for him.

“You’re too high to be making an actionable offer right now,” he said firmly, setting the glass down and picking his paperwork back up. “You should try to go back to sleep, Barton.”

“I’m not tired,” Clint said, yawning a third time without seeming to notice. He lapsed into silence long enough that Phil thought he’d done it anyway, and he almost jumped when Clint started talking again. “So if I asked tomorrow, or after they green-light me on out of here, you’d say yes?”

Clint’s tone was so transparently calculating that Phil couldn’t help but chuckle. At least now he knew he hadn’t given Clint cause to suspect a crush on his part. Clint would never carry a joke this far if he thought it might be poking at a genuine sore spot.

“It’s a serious question!” Clint scolded. He pointed to his cast. “And it’s not nice to mock the injured and infirm.”

“Fine,” Phil said, flipping the file back open. It wasn’t like Clint was wrong; there weren’t any compelling reasons to say no. Saying yes would get Clint to settle down and drift off, satisfied he’d carried the point. Clint wouldn’t remember enough to feel weird about it in the morning. Why shouldn’t Phil let himself see how it felt, just this once? “Yes. If you asked once you were deemed fit for discharge and of sound mind, I would say yes.”

Clint beamed at him, and Phil’s heart seized in his chest. Apparently it felt like someone squeezing the air out of his lungs. Good information to have, in case he ever found himself tempted to say it when it might matter.

“Really?”

Phil swallowed and kept his voice steady and disinterested. “Yes.”

“Wait.” A shadow passed over Clint’s face. “You’re not just saying that because you think I won’t remember it tomorrow, are you?”

“Hadn’t crossed my mind,” Phil said blandly. “I’m sure if this is something you’re sincerely interested in and not asking for solely because you’re high as a kite, you’ll still want it a week from now.”

“Yeah, but what if I don’t remember you said you’re down?” Clint asked, his eyes narrowing. He laughed and snapped his fingers. “Hand me your pen, would you? I’ll write myself a note on my--” He looked down at himself, searching for a patch of unbruised skin he could reach. “Stomach, I guess. Oh, I could write your number on my hip! That’s sexy, right?”

“Please do not write a note-to-self about fellatio, or my phone number, anywhere the entire ward is likely to see it,” Phil said drily. He could just imagine the look on Jasper’s face if something like _that_ wound up grist for the rumor mill. “Please especially do not write it anywhere it’s likely to get photographed and ‘accidentally’ wind up on the official Avengers twitter-feed.”

“Okay, you write me a note, then,” Clint said, his voice going sleep-rough. “‘IOU 1 BJ, xoxo Phil’ or something. Except, you know, classy.”

Phil pictured the face Clint was likely to make if he woke up to find a message implying Phil was interested in him tucked into his cast or under his pillow. Jasper could at least be bribed out of being upset with a generous enough payment against his bar tab at the end of the night. Clint would probably sooner wake up to a text history showing he’d messaged each and every one of his exes to tell them that he still loved them and thought they should all move out to the derelict farm he’d impulse-bought three years ago and start a commune together. Again.

“Why don’t I text you?” Phil asked, smiling slightly. Clint’s phone would be stowed in his locker along with everything else that had been stripped off him when he’d been admitted, any message Phil sent to it safely uncheckable until at least the weekend. And by then Phil was sure a quick confirmation that a new bow had been requisitioned to replace the one broken in the fight wouldn’t stand out among all the well-wishers, concerned friends, and spam.

“No, don’t do that!” Clint yelped, his eyes going wide. “Bobbi’s got my phone. I’ll never live it down if you sext me and she sees it.”

“Ah. Of course.” Phil felt his smile stiffen as the barb sank deeper than it had any right to. He shook his head. He was being ridiculous. It was perfectly natural that Clint would recoil from the possibility of Bobbi thinking Phil was interested in him; even aside from the awkwardness it could introduce to their working relationship, Phil was hardly Clint’s type. “You know, I think I have just the thing.”

He took out the slim notebook he always carried, clicked his pen, and started roughing in a design.

“What are you doing?” Clint murmured, his eyelids drooping.

“Writing you an appropriately classy IOU,” Phil said. He wasn’t going to get any useful work done on the report, and this would give him something to focus on before he gave himself away. With any luck, Clint would be sound asleep well before Phil was done with it.

“That’s a lot of writing for an IOU.” Clint burrowed deeper into the pillow and watched the pen as it moved, his eyes closing farther and farther every time he blinked.

“Think of it as a cashier’s check,” Phil told him, continuing to sketch. It was soothing, after an unexpectedly draining conversation. Clint hadn’t meant it. Phil hadn’t really meant any of it, either. It shouldn’t have felt like pulling the scab off an almost-healed wound. It had just been a very long day, that was all.

“To be redeemed after retirement?” Clint asked, his lips twitching. “I’m onto you, Coulson.”

“To be redeemed within thirty days of medical release,” Phil said. It was a nice, round number. Clint’s breathing was evening out, and he’d be back to sleep in maybe a few minutes if Phil didn’t do anything to jar him.

“And after that it depreciates to a handjob?”

“After that, it’s null and void.” Phil added an eagle to the scrollwork at the top, lightly crosshatching the background.

“I didn’t know you could draw,” Clint said quietly after a moment.

“A bit. Nothing fancy.” Phil added a pair of olive garlands to the sides. He hadn’t used it in the field in a long time, and it hadn’t been a particularly large part of his SHIELD career. He’d have been surprised if it was in his file, even more surprised if it was common knowledge. “I was never great at it, but as far as hobbyists go, I do all right.”

He shrugged, more to himself than Clint. It was calming, portable, and inexpensive, and it was one of the few things that he’d been able to carry over from his everyday civilian life when he’d joined SHIELD.

“And Steve’s an artist.”

Phil glanced at him, startled. There weren’t many people who’d made that connection. Clint was snoring before Phil managed to find a response that respected the conclusion without making the reality of it sound vaguely pathetic, however young he’d been when a Captain America comic book had inspired him to take art classes seriously.

*****

Clint woke to a headache and Tony’s manic grin. Thor was shouting--no, not shouting, just talking very, very loudly about something--in the next room. The headache was somewhat expected, once he sorted through his memories of the previous day’s events, but he felt like Tony’s criminally aggressive cheerfulness and Thor being Thor were both pushing it.

“Didn’t you get cut out of a suit by a giant walking can-opener yesterday?” Clint croaked.

Tony waved a hand and rolled his eyes. “Big deal, I had another suit on under it. Look what I’ve got for you, though.”

He held up a long rectangular box and ripped the top off with a flourish. Clint cocked his head.

“Um. I’m flattered, but I don’t--” Clint tried to think of a polite way to say ‘want to join you in a three-way’ around his headache and failed. “--swing that way. Don’t get me wrong, you’re both hot, and individually, I would absolutely go to town on either you or Pepper, but I’m kind of, uh, a one-person-at-a-time sort of guy.”

Tony stared at him like he’d lost his mind, then did a double-take when he registered the two dozen long-stemmed red roses wrapped in crisp white paper and nestled carefully in the box. He tossed it on the counter and rubbed his forehead.

“This was supposed to be a new bow,” he explained. “A very fancy, very durable, very _awesome_ new bow, that I spent most of last night fabricating, which is probably why I then gave the wrong box to a courier and shipped it across the city. Now, if you’ll excuse me for just one second, I need to go call Dr. Cho and explain why her celebratory Nobel nomination gift is a weapon she can’t use.”

“Aren’t Nobel nominations secret?” Clint asked. 

“Well, I’m the one who nominated her, so in this case, that’s a negatory, good buddy.” Tony clapped the lid back on the box and swept out of the room, his phone already wedged between his cheek and shoulder.

At least Tony was unlikely to make an issue out of Clint thinking he and Pepper were trying to solicit a ménage à trois. It was Tony. He’d probably heard weirder on the way out of the tower this morning, even with the guarded entrance and the paparazzi-proof fence, and it was just as likely already forgotten in his increasingly high-pitched attempt to reach Dr. Cho.

Clint resisted the urge to rub his face. It felt stiff and puffy enough that he knew he’d see a mess when he got around to looking in a mirror, and scrubbing at his skin would only feel good for a second before the bruises reminded him who was boss. Tony’s nonstop patter was reduced to a rising and falling tenor hum by the closing door, making it an interesting but no less annoying counterpoint to Thor’s bass. 

Maybe, Clint thought, he was still asleep. Maybe the entire conversation had been a morphine-induced dream. Maybe when he woke up he’d discover that Sitwell had finally come around to the value of ward-wrangling in terms of strategic morale preservation, and things would be mercifully peaceful. Maybe he’d get a pony for his birthday.

Clint glared balefully at the jug of water, positioned just out of reach in what was quite possibly a universal fit of spite, then turned a sour eye on the needle sticking out of his arm. He’d already gotten told enough times about removing IVs that there was no way he could skate with a story about three layers of medical tape and the needle all mysteriously having fallen off him at the same time. Clint took a deep breath. It was perfectly reasonable to hate being laid up, but he didn’t have to make it worse for himself, did he? And nothing felt too bad. He’d be out by tomorrow morning, tops.

He closed his eyes and tried to relax. If Phil had stayed, he’d be telling Clint to focus on what could be fixed and then deal with what couldn’t after that was taken care of. Of course, if Phil had stayed, Clint could repeat some awful joke Natasha had told him and watch Phil try not to smile at it, his lips twisting and his gaze dropping ever so slightly before he got his serious-agent mask back on. Clint grimaced and wished he’d woken up earlier.

At the moment, the only thing he could fix with any degree of success or permanence was his own thirst. Clint boosted himself up on his elbow, every inch of flesh on his ribs and arm protesting the movement, and pushed himself forward toward the water. His pillow crunched and crackled as his elbow dug into it, and Clint frowned. It hadn’t felt that cheap and papery when he’d been lying on it. He might land in the sickbay a lot more often as an Avenger than he had as a SHIELD grunt, but the accommodations were certainly better than he’d rated back then. 

Clint poured himself a cup, drank it down, and then poured himself another. Tony was pacing back and forth outside the observation window and gesturing wildly, oblivious to everything but his conversation, and Clint patted the pillow experimentally before leaning back. The rustling sounded like it was coming from directly under his left ear, and Clint took a quick preparatory breath, steeled himself, and propped himself back up over the protest of his aching muscles. A laundry tag? Natasha leaving him a note in the most annoying possible way? One of the nurses giving him her number? The last would almost be worth it. His dry spell was beginning to resemble a drought. 

Clint corralled the IV tubes and felt around under the pillow, only to come up with a slip of paper roughly the size of a paycheck. He flopped back onto the bed and immediately regretted it when every twinge in his back lit up at once. He groaned and cursed his rotten luck until the pain subsided. 

Why had the robot he’d picked been the only one to preemptively attack human-sized targets? The rest of them had all waited until they’d been actively engaged to start swinging for agents instead of masonry. Bobbi’s theory that he’d spent a previous life misbehaving in inventive and fantastic ways occasionally seemed like less of a joke and more of a viable theory. Maybe it was worth putting up with Dr. Strange’s bombast to get it checked out.

Clint opened the slip and looked it over. Unlined notebook paper. Black ink, probably from a ballpoint. The paper cut to size evenly but clearly by hand, with a slight bias on the upward slant. The art made it look like a bearer bond, which was sort of neat, and whoever’d done it had a steady hand and clearly a fair amount of experience with line drawing, so--

Clint swallowed and felt his cheeks turning scarlet when he finally read the text.

He stuffed it under the sheets in a half-blind panic when Tony came blustering back into the room.

“So, ah, it turns out that Dr. Cho _can_ use a bow,” Tony said, running his fingers through his hair, “because she was on her college’s archery team, and that she has in fact spent all morning out at the range with your bow, which I guess isn’t your bow after all, because the phrase ‘cold, dead hands’ has been used at least once so far in relation to her and that bow? And her assistants and her supervisor are all incredibly pissed at me because they’re now behind schedule on some tremendously important, astonishingly urgent project.” He popped the lid back off the box. “So, where were we on getting you into bed with me and Pepper?”

Clint put his head in his hands. Between Thor booming away in the next room and Tony having mastered circular breathing just to cram more talking into the same amount of time and the goddamn _cocksucking gift certificate_ that felt like it was burning a hole through the sheet, it was entirely too early in the morning for any of this to be happening.

“Kidding, kidding!” Tony said quickly. He looked around for a vase before giving up and dumping the roses into the water jug. “Though I’m flattered that you’re flattered? Usually when people aren’t down with it, they’re yelling and throwing things and asking if I’m out of my mind. I may, possibly, need to ask with flowers next time. Or at least not in the middle of board meetings.”

“Tony--”

“Still mostly kidding. Sorry I sprung that on you, I was trying to impress you in a completely different way, cross my heart.” Tony spread his hands defensively. “Though now that I think about it, there are a few ways I could improve on the design I came up with, so maybe this was all for the best? I mean, the doctors said it’ll be a week or two before that wrist will stand up to your personal brand of extreme arching, so I’ve got time to make you a new one that’s even shinier than the…” He chewed his lip thoughtfully. “Helen Special? Nobel Helen?” Tony’s eyes brightened suddenly, and he smiled broadly. “The Helen Surprise!”

“Tony?”

“Yeah?”

“Could you please go ask Thor to discuss Pokemon at maybe a tenth of the current volume?” Clint asked wearily. “This headache is killing me, and he’s an accomplice.”

Tony tilted his head for a moment, as if unsure of what Clint was talking about, before the light bulb went on. “Jesus. Yeah, he is kind of into it, isn’t he? Sure thing, be right back.”

Clint closed his eyes and waited until he could hear the soft murmur of Tony’s voice through the wall after the familiar rhythm of Thor’s “hail and well met,” this time reduced to a wordless cadence by the drywall between them. When he was sure Tony wasn’t going to come back anytime soon, Clint pulled the slip out again.

An eagle holding a shield surrounded by olive branches. Ivy filigree. More olive leaves. All of it very tasteful, and a reasonable facsimile of official designs Clint had seen elsewhere. And smack in the center of it, in a neat and regular calligraphic style, was a small wall of text promising Clinton Francis Barton one completed act of fellatio, to be performed promptly upon presentation of the certificate to the issuing agent, redeemable no sooner than his proper and timely discharge from the medical wing and no later than thirty days therefrom.

Clint read it three times before he realized it wasn’t signed. He blinked and turned it over, hoping it said “BobbiBucks” or something equally telling. It was a joke, right? It had to be a joke. 

All he got was another eagle, this one holding a bundle of fasces in its claws and spreading its wings in the center of another bunch of twining olive branches. Clint rubbed his eyes. Not fasces, not on closer inspection. Fasces were just sticks, these had points and fletching. Arrows. An eagle with a bunch of arrows in its claws. Someone had spent a fair amount of time on this, and then hadn’t signed it. Someone had slipped into his room while he was out of it, left it under his pillow for when he wasn’t, and-- 

Clint checked himself. He was tired and sore, and his head hurt, and none of it was an excuse for firing from the hip. The sketch wasn’t signed because he was supposed to know who’d left it, he was pretty sure. There weren’t many people who could pull off something like that, and might conceivably be willing to put his dick in their mouth, or at least joke about it. And he was close to the overwhelming majority of them. So.

“Process of elimination, Barton,” he muttered. 

Not Tony, who had definitely not been planning on intimating a romantic overture just now with the roses, and whose drawings always looked like schematics, and who probably just would have forged a money order to be paid in blowjobs. Not Thor, who was so in love with Jane Foster that he’d somehow just stopped registering other people as potential sex partners and wasn’t conversant enough with Earth-money to produce a faithful generic. 

Scott’s idea of a joke somehow always involved ants or theft, and Hope didn’t seem to actually like Clint that much. He couldn’t see either of them using a Pym-suit to screw around like this, either, and while Hope wasn’t quiet enough to sneak up on him without it, Scott was barely quiet enough with it. 

Not Carol, who was off-planet, and not Bruce, who wasn’t into guys and didn’t have a sense of humor. 

Not Jessica, who currently wasn’t speaking to him. Clint frowned at the thought. This was the kind of joke she might pull, if she was. But she wasn’t, and probably wouldn’t be for the foreseeable future.

Clint turned the paper back over and examined the drawings more closely before putting it away. It had probably been Bobbi, bored out of her skull and waiting for an all-clear so she could pack up her flying daycare center and head back to base. She’d have had ample opportunity to slide it under his pillow before Phil took over. Maybe it was the final piece of the ceasefire, the last signal that things were finally, really and truly, back to normal between them.

Clint wished his skull didn’t feel like it was about to crack in half, or that Phil had dozed through the rest of the team showing up. With Tony and Thor knocking around, Clint couldn’t imagine Phil was just in someone else’s room and ignoring the racket. Normal visiting hours meant Phil would feel comfortable dragging himself back home, or to the couch in his office, to grab a few hours of real sleep before starting his day. The Avengers weren’t even Phil’s problem anymore, and he still kept better tabs on them than the squad of handlers they’d been assigned for support.

Clint stretched. He should probably text Sharon to make sure Phil got a decent breakfast before Fury came up with some other absurdly dangerous mission that no one but Phil--in an organization spanning the globe and comprising some of the most highly-skilled operatives on the planet--could possibly be trusted with. She was new enough it probably wouldn’t be second-nature, the way it had been for him and Nat when Phil was too busy fighting Recon over sloppy intel guaranteed to get everyone who pulled a mission based on it killed or arguing with the comptroller about how much overtime was justified in a situation to feed himself properly.

Clint understood Fury leaning on Phil when it was a matter of life or death, but it wasn’t like Agent May couldn’t ride herd on the geeks for a few hours while Phil took a nap. Sitwell wasn’t great at PR, sure, everyone knew that. He started sweating the second cameras swung in his direction; it made him look nervous, and looking nervous made him look untrustworthy. Good for when they were trying to fan speculation around an event, bad for when they weren’t. Phil was a dab hand at projecting a sort of genial white-guy authority that nervous press flaks latched onto like barnacles, which made him great for immediate-aftermath media access. But they had at least another dozen guys in the same area code who could pull that trick without anyone noticing the difference.

If it came down to it, there wasn’t even any real reason Phil was the one getting dragged out of bed at two in the morning when the Avengers needed a hot-zone cordoned off and shelter set up for the people whose homes had suddenly turned into a crater-pocked battlefield. There were other people who could do that, too. Granted, there wasn’t anybody Clint would rather have on the ground keeping a lid on things, and it having been Phil instead of someone with fewer hours at the wheel had kept that lid on tighter than anyone could have hoped for. And he could get his way with the other departments a lot more often than Sitwell seemed to be able to.

But there had still been an unaccountable knot in Clint’s gut, back when he’d learned Phil intended to rotate back onto the field roster after the Chitauri invasion. It had only gotten worse once medical had finally cleared Phil to resume active duty. Clint had tried to convince himself that he was just worried, after they’d come so close to losing him. After Phil had gone out and proved exactly how fragile a human was, stacked up against a god. Lurking around the edges of it, though, was the plain fact that it had been nice, having him on a set schedule and handling PR for the team. 

Even if Clint hadn’t been the immediate beneficiary of it, he’d have been blind not to notice it. Phil had seemed more relaxed than Clint could remember him ever having been before. Happier, calmer, readier with a laugh or a smile. More approachable. Phil had wound up taking on three new junior-agent mentees just because they’d suddenly felt comfortable asking if he would. 

Clint had hoped it would become the new normal, that it might gradually edge out flying bullets and raging monsters until Phil realized he was more effective as a voice in their earpieces than a presence on the street. He’d had no such luck. Phil had been back to burning the candle at both ends and staring down gamma-powered terrorists before Clint had been fully cleared to help back him up. 

Clint glanced at the clock. He had maybe twenty minutes left to catch Sharon before she was guaranteed to be busy, and maybe ten before Phil’s normal slate of appointments started. He looked around, trying and failing to pick out the vivid purple of his phone’s case from the white-and-steel gloss of the medical suite.

After a second, Clint closed his eyes and exhaled slowly. Bobbi had his phone, didn’t she? 

Bobbi had his phone, and the nurses weren’t going to run messages for him, and he knew from past rides on the merry-go-round that nobody was going to let him talk his way into an early discharge. He’d burned his bridges over that river early and well.

Clint clenched his fist and resisted the urge to pull his IV out, consequences be damned. He didn’t want to be in this bed, listening to Thor and Tony argue about Pikachu. He didn’t want to be benched, even if it was just for a week or two. He didn’t want to be in possession of a mystery voucher for oral sex with the vague but troubling recollection of Bobbi’s drawing skills being limited to stick figures forming in the back of his aching brain.

“You keep making that face, it’s going to stick,” Natasha said, shouldering the door open. He was relieved to see she was barely limping. The last fall he’d seen her take during the fight could easily have landed her on crutches. “And if you make a run for it, Sitwell’s going to finally have that stroke he’s been working on since Jess told him Spider-Man had pheromones too.”

“Phone?” he asked. She handed hers over, and he fired off a quick text to Sharon.

“And yet the thunderhead’s not clearing,” she observed when he passed it back.

Clint handed the slip to her wordlessly and lowered himself back onto the pillow, slightly mollified. Even if Phil wouldn’t stop running headlong into trouble in those always-shined wingtips of his, Clint could comfort himself with having done what he could to make sure he was well-fed while he did it. Natasha read the note, then let her eyebrows climb.

“Do I want to know who gave this to you, that it gets that look in response?” Natasha asked.

“ _I_ want to know who gave it to me!” Clint snapped. “It was under my pillow when I woke up. Can Bobbi draw?”

Natasha’s brief, amused snort was the only answer he needed.

“Do you think it might have been Sharon?” he asked. He was sure there were other possibilities he was overlooking, but he couldn’t think of any. “Does that look like Sharon’s handwriting?”

“It doesn’t look like anyone’s handwriting,” she said after a moment. “It’s proper script. And Sharon would have gotten you a vase to go along with the flowers.”

Clint puffed out his cheeks. “The flowers are from Tony, by way of a shipping error.”

“Dare I ask?” 

“You really don’t,” he said. The last thing anyone needed was Natasha finding out Dr. Cho was an archery enthusiast.

“Okay. Since when are you into Sharon?”

“Everyone’s into Sharon. She’s great,” Clint said, defensive. “And she could conceivably have ninjaed her way in here without waking me up.”

“Clint, you were dead to the world. An entire marching band could have gotten in here without waking you up.”

Clint watched as she held the paper up to the light, looking for a visible watermark or a clearer view of any recurring design worked into the motifs.

“Yeah, but an entire marching band didn’t leave me a note saying they wanted to blow me,” he grumbled. 

“Maybe just the wind section?” she asked, not even bothering to hide her smirk, and Clint glared at her.

“When I said no more puns, I should have said no terrible jokes,” he said. 

“Maybe, but you didn’t. You walked right into that one. And I’m winning the puns back next poker night,” she promised.

“Over my empty wallet and possibly dead body. I can’t live through another five minutes of fish puns, Nat.” It hadn’t been bad with no one else around to encourage her, but with Jess back on active duty, they were perfectly capable of spending an entire night one-upping each other at everyone in earshot. 

Clint gnawed at the driest section of his chapped lips, wishing painkillers didn’t knock him out so badly. Anything stronger than a Tylenol-3 tended to put him on his ass in short order. It probably hadn’t been Sharon, if he was honest. Sharon seemed pretty well stuck on Steve, who seemed pretty taken with her every time he forgot she was Peggy’s niece for five minutes. She was in a kind of decaying orbit around him and Sam, and Bobbi had once proposed that they cut to the chase, move the three of them into a suite together the next time they were all deployed at once, and let nature take its course once they got back.

“Who was on the visitor list for last night?”

“The entire team, Xavier’s first-responders--”

“Not that we didn’t need the help, but did we ever get an answer on what they were doing here?” Clint asked. The awkward kid with the optic lasers had been a godsend just in terms of expediting the cleanup, but the idea that they had that kind of firepower just roaming the country was a little alarming.

“Field trip,” Natasha said. Clint flinched. “Half the containment crew, Skye’s pet nerds--”

“Am I wrong in thinking that if you’re young enough to be on a field trip to the city, you’re probably too young to be fighting giant killer robots?”

“I’m sure Professor X made them all get their permission slips signed in advance. Did you want a full list or not?” Natasha huffed, rolling her eyes.

“Yeah, sorry.” Clint rubbed his jaw. “Or maybe not. I thought it might narrow down the pool, but it sounds like it was pretty much everyone?”

She shrugged, a concession of the point, and the lull in conversation was covered by a sudden spike in volume from Thor and Tony. Clint groaned and scowled at the wall, a new burst of irritation rolling through him like a rogue wave.

“Can you do me a favor and bat your eyelashes at Sitwell over getting me sprung this morning?” he asked. If he was going to be uncomfortable and tired, he could at least be uncomfortable and tired somewhere he could hear himself think.

“You want me to terrorize our handler into giving you _less_ time to come up with a name?” Natasha asked, handing the slip back to him. “Clint, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you haven’t exactly been hitting home runs lately. You could use an easy win.”

“Huh?”

“Anderson, Runciter, Adair, Jackson, Merced, Kyota.” Natasha ticked the names off on her fingers.

He’d been swinging for the fences, in terms of women who might possibly have gone on a date with him, but there’d been the outside chance of an acceptance. He had a better shot with analysts and support staff, women who could hear him talk about missions and think it was exciting instead of evidence that he had terrible luck and worse timing. Other agents and field operatives were a much harder sell, especially if they couldn’t have a sense of humor about giving him advice. Though with Natasha rattling off his failures off like that, it sounded grimmer than it had felt at the time.

She smiled, quick and sly, one corner of her mouth twitching up in the way that made him expect another round of puns, poker-won promises be damned. “Moneypenny.”

“Ha ha.” Clint scowled at her. He’d give half a paycheck for Teresa to have been a Moneypenny. Bond actually got away with hitting on Moneypenny, even if he never scored off it. “If I’d known Teresa was Fury’s PA, I would never, ever, not in a million years have made a pass at her. I thought she was just some level-sixer on loan from the Hub.”

“Why did you think Sitwell was making the face?” Natasha sighed.

“What face?” he asked.

“The face,” she repeated, her brows furrowing. “The one he makes where you can literally see him trying to bargain with a higher power for what he knows is about to happen to somehow not happen.”

She mimicked one of Sitwell’s more frequent expressions, and Clint frowned.

“That’s just his face, Nat,” he said.

“Oh, Clint.” Natasha shook her head, mock-pity coloring her features. “It really isn’t.” She nodded at the slip in his hand. “The clock doesn’t start ticking until you’re discharged. If you honestly have no idea who left it, and you’re going to try figuring it out, why not up your odds?”

“Come on.” Clint wrinkled his nose. “I’ve got thirty days. How hard could it possibly be?”


	2. Chapter 2

Sixteen days later, Clint was wishing he’d stayed in medical for as long as humanly possible.

“Clint.” Natasha leaned over his shoulder, her eyes going to the paper in front of him. There were three columns of names running from top to bottom, maybe a tenth of which had been crossed off. “How hard could this possibly be?”

He grunted noncommittally in response.

“The deputy director didn’t leave that note,” she continued, stealing one of his french fries.

“She _could_ have,” Clint protested, pushing his plate out of her reach. “She had means and opportunity.”

“No motive, though,” Bobbi said, sliding neatly into a seat opposite him and snagging his sandwich.

“Did you two plan this?” Clint asked sullenly.

“Maybe,” Bobbi said, taking a bite with no apparent sign of guilt.

“A little,” Natasha added. She sat down next to Bobbi and grabbed another fry.

“The cafeteria line is literally thirty feet away and has two people in it.” He gestured toward it, the neon green wrap around his splint making the move even more ridiculous than he’d feared. He frowned at the effect and dropped his hand back to his lap. Somehow knowing that it was coming off tomorrow made resisting the impulse to ‘accidentally’ lose it harder rather than easier.

“That food’s the product of crass mercantilism,” Bobbi told him. “This food’s by right of conquest.”

Clint put his forehead on the table and exhaled noisily. “Why are you like this?”

“You weaseled out of the all-morning lecture on how we’ve failed America, with the brief fifteen-minute break for a Q&A about how we’ve failed Sitwell specifically,” Scott told him, clapping him on the shoulder. “It’s only natural the people who couldn’t are going to take it out of your hide a little.”

“You learn that in prison?” Clint snorted.

“National Geographic special on chimps. Jackass.” Scott went for the list, and Clint snatched it away just in time.

Bobbi plucked it out of his hands while he was still glaring at Scott.

“Hey!”

“Shush,” Bobbi scolded. She pulled out a pen. “We’re helping.”

Scott plopped down next to him and tried to get a high-five from Natasha, who looked at him blankly until he put his hand down.

“You’re ganging up on me,” Clint said. 

He hadn’t meant for it to blow up like this, when he’d shown Bobbi. He’d talked himself back into thinking it might have been her, even though Natasha had been sure and he couldn’t see Bobbi not signing it. Mostly, he’d assumed she’d know who had left it, if it wasn’t her. She’d never been much of one to pass gossip on, but she somehow always seemed up on whatever scuttlebutt was going around the base. She hadn’t known, but by god she’d taken an interest in finding out. 

On the one hand, they were back to being thick as thieves, and he was willing to overlook a small amount of public humiliation in exchange for getting right with her. On the other, everyone else she’d roped in had taken just as big an interest, and it was beginning to have a ripple effect. 

Clint wasn’t sure if his love life was that big a general source of schadenfreude, or if it had just been a slow week for everyone. They’d gotten a quarter of their normal monster-and-supervillain calls since he’d been laid up, but that usually meant everyone was working overtime on other projects or squeezing in family outings and training sessions they’d been putting off. Now the only thing anyone seemed to care about was IDing Clint’s admirer.

“Do you need reinforcements?” Steve asked from behind him. 

Steve’s tone was somewhere between amused and genuinely offering, and Clint froze, his face going red. Bobbi had recruited half the team already, but Clint had managed to keep her away from everyone he’d never be able to look in the eye afterward if they found out he was taking something so ludicrous so seriously. Bobbi was already watching Steve like a cat drawing a bead on a songbird, and Clint stared at her in horror.

“No,” he mouthed, and she winked at him.

“Nah, we’re just playing around. Clint’s been trying to solve this sudoku puzzle by himself for a week, and Bobbi won’t stop trying to help,” Scott said easily. 

Steve laughed, and Clint envied the thousand-watt, motion-activated sincerity of Scott’s fake grin. If Clint could bluff like everything was fine half as easily as Scott could, he’d never have another uncomfortable conversation in his life. Then again, he’d voluntarily surrounded himself with people who saw right through his stoic-badass front, so maybe Jessica was right about his reflexive self-sabotage.

“Just yell if you need someone in your corner,” Steve said, waving as he walked past. Sam and Sharon both lit up as soon as they saw him coming, and Clint kicked at Bobbi’s shins under the table.

“Will you leave him out of it?” he hissed. “I still have to work with everybody after you stop finding this whole thing so fucking funny.”

“And I don’t?” she asked archly. She clicked the pen idly as she read, her face going blank with thought for a few seconds. Then she crossed out fifteen names in quick succession, the motion of her hands as quick and sure as if she was loading a gun. 

Clint tried to ignore the quick flutter of adrenaline at the thought of her prematurely excluding someone. “You can transfer off Coulson’s squad. You’ve got enough seniority, and it’s not like Hand wouldn’t be happy to have you back kicking ass on the west coast. There’s not exactly another Avengers team I can slink off to if you make Captain America think I’m a--what did they even call them in the ‘40s? Sex-maniac?”

“Satyr,” Natasha supplied. Bobbi passed the list to her, and she read it with a cool look.

“Dude, Steve was in World War II,” Scott said. “You know, when they were putting up giant posters reminding everyone to wrap it up with hookers because you can’t fight if you’ve got the clap? Hell, with his watercolor chops, maybe he even designed some of those posters.”

Clint paused, his brows furrowing. Steve had been an art student, before he’d been Captain America. Steve was….

Clint bit his lip. There was something there, some tenuous link he couldn’t see, some memory refusing to be jogged.

“Clint?” Natasha prompted.

It had escaped him, whatever it had been. He shook his head and gave up.

“I thought I had something,” he said. He shot Bobbi a dirty look when she took another bite of his sandwich. “Probably just low blood-sugar.”

“If you promise to stop feeling sorry for yourself, I’ll buy you lasagna and a salad before we have to go back for round two with Sitwell,” she said.

Natasha started crossing off names, stopped to chew thoughtfully on the pen, then crossed off two more. “Did you ever apologize to Jessica?”

Clint recognized it as the tone that meant she knew damn well he hadn’t but was reminding him he should in a way he couldn’t argue with. He hated that tone, and she knew it. She glanced up, smiled sweetly, and crossed off another name without even looking at the paper.

“Kind of?” he hedged. More precisely, he’d gone to apologize, and then Jess had torn into him again, and he’d hit back with a few choice things he hadn’t meant and certainly shouldn’t have opened his mouth and said.

“So no, you didn’t,” Scott said, his grin turning smug. “Don’t you have enough chaos in your life? Do you really need the lady who can crawl on ceilings and shoot stuff out of her hands mad at you on top of everything else?”

“You’re only afraid of her because she’s your biggest natural predator,” Clint snapped. He didn’t need a lecture on friendship from Scott, of all people. “Besides, it was an accident. If I’d known Jess was seeing that analyst, I never would have gone out with her. It’s not my fault her girlfriend was a cheat.”

“You could still apologize for sticking your dick in her girlfriend,” Scott pointed out.

“Even if I don’t mean it?” Natasha had crossed out three more names, and his voice had more of an edge to it than he’d intended.

“Especially if you don’t mean it,” Scott assured him, smiling innocently. “All my best apologies have been the ones I didn’t mean in the slightest.”

Clint wondered how Scott made it through so many days completely unpunched.

“You’re taking a lot of flak for something you don’t actual-facts care about,” Bobbi pointed out. “Acknowledging that it was shitty and apologizing for it would tank most of that. Jess likes you too much to hold a grudge for long if you just meet her halfway.”

Clint slouched back in his chair, his shoulders slumping as most of the fight drained out of him. He was sorry Jess was mad at him, but if she and Christina had been a little more open about their relationship in the first place, he’d have known better. Hell, he’d have ratted her out to Jess when she first started flirting with him. Natasha finished with the list, and Scott reached for it. Clint slapped his hands away.

“Absolutely not. Their opinion, I trust,” he said firmly. “Yours? Not so much.”

Scott rolled his eyes. “Hand on the Bible, I am not going to strike anyone from the suspect list unless I am absolutely, one-hundred-percent positive they could not possibly be the Blowjob Bandit.”

Clint stared at him, his mouth hanging open, and Bobbi started snickering.

“The what?” Clint finally managed.

“Is that not what we’re calling them?” Scott asked.

“Right back with your lasagna.” Bobbi shook her head and got to her feet. “Prepare to taste a meal brought to you by the power of friendship.”

“The power of restitution, you mean.” Clint waved her off and rubbed his eyes. “‘Blowjob Bandit’ kind of implies they steal blowjobs, not give out coupons for freebies. So no, that’s not what anyone who knows how the English language works has been calling them.”

“Not even with the whatchacallit, alliteration?” Scott asked, prying the paper out of Clint’s fingers. “Huh.”

“What?” Clint demanded.

“Nothing, I just assumed there’d be at least one name I could cross off,” he said, crestfallen. “I don’t know where any of these people were that night.” Scott read through the list a second time. “You know what you should do, though?”

“Wanted poster?” Natasha asked, her expression shifting into the vaguely chipper look that always sent a chill down Clint’s spine. He could never tell if she was being helpful or setting some grand disaster in motion when she had that look on her face.

“Well, couldn’t hurt,” Scott conceded. “I was going to say ask Coulson, though. He set up camp almost as soon as they checked you in, and he’d have noticed if anyone was over-the-top mooning over you, right?”

Clint made a strangled noise, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath. He was pretty sure he’d never live it down if Steve found out about the voucher, or that Clint was actually trying to track down whoever’d given it to him. If _Phil_ found out, there was no doubt whatsoever in Clint’s mind that he’d be the first person on record to die of shame-fueled spontaneous combustion. The sound of every pathetic fantasy he’d ever entertained shattering under the weight of Phil’s disappointed look would probably set off car alarms in the parking garage. Or maybe it would be exactly what Phil expected out of him, which would somehow be worse.

“Your helpful suggestion is that I ask the most straight-laced guy on the entire continent if he noticed anyone hanging around the medical wing who seemed unusually eager to suck my dick,” Clint said finally.

Scott shrugged. “Yeah, pretty much. I mean, obviously they wouldn’t have had long, drawn-out conversations with him about it? I hope? I feel like they’d be on report until the end of time over something like that, and Bobbi would’ve heard about it already. But he’s pretty observant. Like every single time I tried to sneak onto the jet those three weeks I got grounded, he just knew. Total sixth sense or something. And he’s been a SHIELD agent for like eighty years now, so somebody leaving love-notes for a downed agent isn’t even going to move the meter for him.”

“I think it’s a great idea,” Natasha volunteered, watching him closely. Clint scowled at her. To the best of his knowledge, he hadn’t done anything in the past month to deserve this kind of needling from her.

“You do?” Scott asked, surprised. His brain caught up to his mouth after a second, and he turned to Clint. “See? Natasha thinks it’s a good idea.”

“If he can give us the windows when he had to leave his post, we can restrict the candidates to only people who’d have had access then, or people he knows were present in the room,” she explained. It sounded reasonable when she said it, too. There was a sharpness to her smile, though, and Clint knew he was playing with fire. 

Scott held up his hand, anticipation plain on his face, and Clint grabbed his elbow to pull it back down.

“Just stop,” Clint said. “Nobody wants to high-five you. And I’m not involving the brass in--”

“The Hunt for the Blowjob Bandit?” Scott supplied.

Clint glared at him. “Let’s just go with Operation Date-Quest, okay?”

“Coulson’s the brass, now?” Natasha asked, stealing his last fry.

Clint glowered at her helplessly. How many years of letting him hide his idiotic infatuation, and now she was suddenly picking at him about it in public? In front of Scott? He racked his brain. He hadn’t done anything to piss her off, he was sure of that. He froze, his heart turning over in his chest.

Natasha didn’t always ask before she borrowed his phone, the same way he didn’t always ask before he used hers. Had she seen one of the pictures of Phil that Skye had taken to sending him every so often, apparently just for kicks? There was always some paper-thin pretext, some innocent figleaf of a message to go with it, and there was no way Skye could possibly have any idea what buttons she was pushing, except that she had to in order to keep pushing them like she was. There was no way she could even really know, except that she didn’t need to _know_ to make the connection, did she? Intuition calibrated by years in the foster system and on the street would have been enough, and she was whip-smart on top of it.

And for all that the last one--a soft-lit candid of Phil with his tie loosened, a tired but satisfied look on his face, and a keycard between his teeth, the angle mostly obscuring the fact that his hands were full and he was elbowing his office door open--had almost made Clint swallow his tongue, there was a veneer of plausible deniability. That time, the accompanying text had asked if the tie pattern was a paisley or a houndstooth. But if Natasha had seen something like that from Skye, it would be open season. Skye hadn’t fully internalized the idea that some secrets were better off kept; if she knew it, and it wasn’t a matter of life and death, then the whole base was going to know it sooner or later. There was no point in Natasha playing coy if Skye was in the mix.

“I always thought of him as more like The Man,” Scott said, oblivious to the sudden tension. “Hill’s the brass. Fury’s the brass. That Army guy that hates Bruce is the brass.”

“You know what I mean,” Clint muttered. He gave Bobbi a pleading look as she came back with a fully-loaded tray. “Back me up, Bobbi.”

“In the field, always,” she said easily. She set the food down in front of him. “In the lunchroom, only after a full briefing.”

“Speaking of which,” Natasha sighed.

“Yeah, I know, we’re due back in like five seconds,” Bobbi said. She grimaced at Clint. “At least you can take some comfort in being the only black sheep that knows better than to get in a twitter-fight with a sitting senator?”

Clint waved at them as they trooped off and dug into the replacement meal Bobbi had brought. It was what he’d initially wanted, what he’d had the first impulse to buy. He’d been too cheap to get it for himself, though. The sandwich with its side of fries had been two bucks less and good enough. Natasha didn’t bother shooting any enigmatic looks at him over her shoulder, which he took as a momentary ceasefire. 

It wasn’t like he hadn’t tried, repeatedly and energetically, to smother his attraction to Phil. He’d even convinced himself that he’d managed it a few times, only to have his delusions blown out of the water by a fraught mission, or a few seconds alone with Phil in close quarters, or Phil turning up to a hearing or a mixer in a particularly flattering suit. Clint had thought not working with him as closely would help, but seeing him at plainclothes functions like the fundraisers Tony kept throwing had more than made up for it.

Clint turned back to the list, feeling sorry for himself. Between Bobbi and Natasha, the pile of potential sketch-artists had gone from unwieldy to somewhat reasonable. He tried not to regret a few of the names they’d crossed off and focused on what was left. Hope had suggested early on that he knock everyone he wasn’t interested in out of the running, over Scott’s objection that Clint being interested had no bearing on whether or not someone had left him the note. Hope had looked at Scott like he was an idiot and pointed out that it was a moot point who’d left the note if no one Clint wanted to bang could have done it, and at least that way they were narrowing the dataset down to something manageable.

Clint had agreed with Scott at the time, motivated more by curiosity and solving the puzzle than the prospect of having a sure yes if he asked someone out for dinner or a drink. Now that he’d spent over two weeks trying and failing to figure out who might have a secret crush on him, he was beginning to see Hope’s point about clearing the field. He liked to think he wasn’t particularly oblivious and would have noticed someone flirting with him in a normal office, but as it was, he was surrounded by people with megawatt charisma, intimacy issues, and counterintel training. At least half of them wouldn’t have had any problem palming off a voucher undetected while he was doped up, either.

Clint started on the salad and mulled over what Natasha had said about asking Phil. He’d never come out and confessed to having an enormous, and enormously inappropriate, crush on their ex-handler. But it was Natasha, and there was no way she didn’t know. If he’d ever had any doubts about that, the last few minutes had cleared the field of them. At least she’d refrained from teasing him about it until they’d been permanently reassigned to the Avengers and he was getting periodic updates about Phil’s wardrobe from a teenager.

It wasn’t even that Phil was as buttoned-down as they came. There were enough straight-laced, by-the-book buzzkills in SHIELD who had still contrived to light up the board with their romantic escapades that Clint’s hopes hadn’t been dashed on those rocks. But there was no putting his best foot forward with someone who’d had to cut him out of his uniform after a genetically-engineered squid-monster had slimed it beyond all hope of a functional zipper, defend him from a court-martial over coming back from a mission with an underage KGB assassin in tow, and negotiate a cease-fire in three prank-wars with rival SHIELD units so far. Phil had been the one cleaning up after every significant humiliating defeat, questionable choice, and burst of immaturity for years. 

It might have been different if there had been a give and take to it, the way there was with Bobbi and Nat and even Wise. Who got injured or slimed or caught short on a mission was largely a matter of luck, and it would be someone else’s turn on the stretcher or in the decontamination shower the next time. But Phil was generally good about staying out of the line of fire if he wasn’t supposed to be there, and if Phil got called onto the carpet for a snafu, Clint usually wasn’t cleared to be in the room for it.

There was nothing to even the score except the occasional vintage Howling Commandos poster found at a yard sale or antique spy gadget scavenged from a newly-discovered Stasi bolt-hole, little tokens that Phil couldn’t accept as personal gifts but clearly took pleasure in adding to SHIELD’s archives or the general office decor. Clint wilted slightly. If there had been a point in time when Phil might have considered Clint a serious prospect, it was in the distant past. And that had been the state of affairs even before Clint had hesitated for a second too long, gotten zapped with an infinity gem, and led an invading alien’s forces on a rampage through a half-dozen SHIELD facilities. Before he’d almost gotten Phil killed.

Clint picked at a chunk of tomato and deliberately pushed the memory away. If Phil had ever held Clint personally responsible for anything he’d done under Loki’s influence, he’d at least had the grace not to show it. Phil had needed some space afterwards, sure, but Clint had seen no echo of the accusatory, suspicious looks others had given him in Phil’s face.

But there was knowing he didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell with Phil, which Clint did, and then there was having to watch as Phil’s expression shaded into that particular strain of disappointment that meant he’d expected better but was suddenly realizing he shouldn’t have, which Clint would rather chew his own arm off than do. He hadn’t seen that look since the day he’d turned up in Phil’s office with the paperwork for his and Bobbi’s drunken Vegas wedding and their subsequent hungover Vegas annulment, and explaining the whole tawdry misadventure to Phil had been almost as painful as having it in the first place. If anything was going to prompt another lowering of Phil’s expectations, Clint spending his downtime pending medical clearance on a base-wide snipe-hunt for the author of a promissory note involving fellatio would be it.

Though, now that Clint thought about it, if he could invent a reasonable cover story, there was no need to explain precisely why he wanted a list of people who’d been in his hospital room, was there? Clint had made enough stupid bets, both on the weekly poker night and in general, over the years that Phil would hardly bat an eye at one more.

*****

“I don’t know how you can be so calm about all of this,” Jasper grumbled, flopping onto the couch across from Phil’s desk. Phil shot him a sharp look when he went to put his feet up on the arm, and he grudgingly kicked his shoes off first. “Are you planning to fake your death and run away to Tahiti? Because if you are, I swear on my mother’s grave that I will rat you out to anyone who’ll listen unless I’m on that plane with you. You’ll have so many emotionally-stunted specialists and codependent assassins chasing after you to bring you back that Fury’ll just open a branch office and put you in charge of it.”

“Your mother isn’t dead,” Phil pointed out mildly. He unpacked the bag of take-out containers Jasper had brought and began arranging them on the desk.

“She still has a grave.” Jasper caught the box of egg rolls Phil tossed him, then jammed a throw-pillow under his head. “Something like twenty of them now, in fact. I think she might be speculating on the market.”

“You think?” Phil asked. He considered the duck sauce packets with some trepidation before throwing them at the couch as well. Jasper was in the habit of just squirting the sauce right into his mouth before taking a bite of the rolls, which was frankly disgusting, but he’d paid for and picked up the meal.

“Well, I do have a large extended family, so she may also be taking sensible funeral planning a little too seriously. I feel like speculating might be a little more likely, though, especially now that she’s dating a guy on the zoning board. She’s been going kind of stir-crazy since she retired. I think she misses working with NGOs.” Phil raised his eyebrows, and Jasper looked hurt. “Providing security for NGOs counts as working with them.”

“She ran guns on contract for people the CIA couldn’t, or simply wouldn’t, acknowledge. We’re already five euphemisms in. One more and we’re just lying.” Phil opened a carton of fried rice and inhaled, the smell making his mouth water. He needed to go back to blocking time out of his schedules for meals instead of grabbing things on the fly whenever he could spare a few minutes. Cheap take-out in his office an hour after almost everyone else had gone home shouldn’t make him feel this grateful. “Has she considered consulting for them directly? It’s not fieldwork, but it would get her out of the house and give her something to do besides corrupt municipal officials.”

“It’s fine, he was already corrupt,” Jasper said easily. “And the last thing I need is my mom working for the CIA. You know how Fury feels about them. She keeps talking about how her retirement community’s getting hosed on their security contract, so I think I’m going to suggest--you know, casually--that she incorporate and then undercut them. I mean, it would at least get her off the subject of when I’m ditching the Avengers and running real ops again so she can live vicariously through my horrible near-misses in the foreign hellhole of the month.”

“Your last real op was in Alabama--”

“I couldn’t understand anyone,” Jasper interrupted, “the UN has threatened to send in election observers, and I had to get tested for chikungunya when I got back. It counts.”

“It does not. And she’s not cleared to know the details of anything you do,” Phil said. 

He couldn’t manage to put any heat in his voice, though. The rice was perfectly done, the amount of egg was just right, the shrimp were tender, and the vegetables were still crisp. He’d spent two weeks playing catch-up on his quarterlies, prioritizing recent investigation requests, and bickering with Maria about lifting a few of Skye’s security restrictions. If his luck held and no new emergencies came up, he might get a real weekend soon instead of having to cart a secured tablet full of more work home with him. And, for whatever it was worth, Jasper was one of the few people left in his life that Phil trusted, automatically and implicitly, to be able to come out of something in one piece no matter the odds or the circumstances. It sapped a certain amount of tension out of being friends with him.

There were agents who got dropped into enemy territory with nothing but their wits and walked out days later, mission complete and none the worse for wear, and then there were agents like Jasper. The last time he’d been allowed in the field unsupervised, he’d pushed mission parameters so far he’d broken them before coming back at them from the wrong direction, completed someone else’s mission on top of it, and turned up at the extraction point drunk in a local warlord’s stolen Porsche with a duffle bag full of cash, a crate full of guns, and a complicated explanation for how none of it was his fault. Nick had tried transferring him to the CIA over it on the grounds that they deserved each other.

The man’s life was a circus, but he was incontrovertibly the ringmaster.

“Well, I mostly just lie about them. And before you make your ethics-face at me, yes, I’m sure she knows I’m lying. And that she knows that I know that she knows. You know, it’s weird, but I feel like they’re some of the most honest conversations we’ve ever had with each other?” Jasper sucked on a duck-sauce packet, then took a bite of an egg roll. He closed his eyes and chewed blissfully. “God, this place does the best egg rolls. Plenty of meat, just a little burned.” He turned mid-chew and looked at Phil, his eyes narrowed. “Did you just use my mom to dodge a question?”

“I have no memory of the question to which you’re referring.”

That earned him a frustrated groan and an exceedingly foul look.

Phil smiled coolly. “If I was going to fake my death and run away to Tahiti, it would be aboard a cargo ship, not a plane. Less security, fewer questions, and the occasional port of call to break the monotony.”

“Ugh. You’re the worst. That’s actually why you’re so calm, isn’t it?” Jasper asked. “You had an experimental procedure done when you cleared level four to have your capacity for empathy removed. This job is going to give me a coronary, and the only thing you’ll miss is the sesame chicken.”

“I told you letting them have verified social media accounts was a bad idea,” Phil chuckled. He’d included examples of exactly how bad it could get, too. Jasper hadn’t seen it coming because he hadn’t wanted to see it coming. “Count your lucky stars it was political and not something the press finds interesting for more than five minutes. And I don’t have an ethics-face.”

“Yes, you do. Like when I told you about hiring those prostitutes in Vegas, you made the ethics-face and started telling me about how prostitution isn’t legal in the city itself.” Jasper started on the next egg roll, and Phil shook his head. “I looked it up, though, and it’s not illegal to hire prostitutes to do non-prostitute stuff. Well, I mean it kind of is, but it’s the bullshit sort of illegal like not giving tax certs to guys you hired off the Home Depot parking lot to help you clear brush, not the real kind of illegal like getting caught paying someone to bang you.”

“Which begs the question--”

“Because it was still kind of bizarre, and if I’d tried hiring actors or something, they’d have all just assumed it was a sex thing,” Jasper explained impatiently, emphasizing his point with a sharp slash of the half-eaten roll. “Hiring working girls saved time. It’s not my fault a prototype Iron Man suit got swiped from the baggage claim and we had to con the Gaming Commission to get it back.” 

Phil tilted his head. “You say that, but.”

“Whatever,” Jasper snorted. “Next time you make the ethics-face, I’ll take a picture and show it to you.”

Phil wiped his hands on a napkin, then rifled through a few papers. “So long as you’re here and determined to talk shop, do you know why I’m getting expense reports and hourly-rate invoices for something called Heroes for Hire?”

“Um.” Jasper fiddled with his tie, and Phil cringed at the grease stains he was leaving on the fabric. “I have no memory of being briefed on any project by that title?”

“Because this is your signature on the authorization form,” Phil continued, watching him over the edge of the folder.

Jasper gave him a persecuted look. “They’re plausibly deniable!”

“They list us as a satisfied customer on their web page,” Phil said. “That’s the opposite of plausible deniability.”

“I’ll have them take it down.” Jasper hoisted himself upright and snagged the carton of beef with broccoli. “Ah. Soy sauce?”

“Taking something down isn’t as helpful as you seem to think it is. The internet has a long memory.” Phil shook the bag and pawed through the bottom before finding a lone tube of soy sauce.

“Man,” Jasper said, holding up the half-ounce tube and somehow managing to look devastated. “You should start keeping a bottle of it in your desk. They did this to us last time, too.”

“I had a bottle in my desk,” Phil said, pointing his fork at him. “You stole it, remember?”

“That doesn’t sound like something I’d do,” Jasper said, settling back onto the couch. 

“And yet you did it.”

“And if I did it, which I don’t think I did, honestly, whose fault is that? If everyone knows you keep hot sauce and scotch and the good mustard with the little gritty bits in your office, it’s not going to last long around here,” Jasper explained blithely. He caught Phil’s miffed expression and drew his shoulders up in a quick shrug. “Look, I’ll have them take it down, and you have one of your little white-hat Matrix-monsters give Google’s cache a blind spot, and no one’ll be the wiser. Problem solved.”

“Engaging in a domestic cover-up to avoid paperwork is the opposite of problem-solving,” Phil grunted, picking at his rice. He blinked stupidly at a sudden flash of light, and Jasper waved his phone at him triumphantly.

“Got it!”

Phil stared at him for a brief second before giving up and shaking his head. “Just put them on the roster properly. It’ll streamline the billing process and make sure funding is coming from the right accounts.”

“But this is so much cheaper!” Jasper protested. “And this way, if one of them tells Senator Stern to kiss their collective ass, which they probably would because they’re kind of surly and at least one of them has a drinking problem and, let’s face it, Stern can pretty much kiss everyone’s collective ass, then I don’t have to yell at everyone about where our paychecks come from.” He nudged his glasses up onto his forehead and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “We can just deny all knowledge, like we used to when times were simpler, the press was on the take, and movies cost a nickel.”

“Movies haven’t cost a nickel since Rogers was ninety pounds in full kit,” Phil said, “and all of that still doesn’t account for why I’m getting the paperwork.”

“They’re independent contractors, so they fall under your purview.”

“Since when?” Phil demanded. He was reasonably sure he wouldn’t have missed that, not unless Nick had deliberately buried it. The only contractors whose billing and contracts he handled were…. Phil sighed, then covered his eyes. Of course. “Please tell me you didn’t have accounts payable add them as entertainment.”

“I wouldn’t know. All that tax stuff is beyond me, but I’m sure it’s fine. HR knows what they’re doing.” Jasper stretched back out on the couch and fixed Phil with a look he could only assume was meant to be reassuring. Phil found it hard not to shudder. “Speaking of which--”

“No,” Phil said.

“You don’t even know what I’m going to ask.” Jasper glared at him, and the effect was ruined by the pair of snow peas draped off the fork halfway to his mouth.

“And yet somehow I’m still confident in my answer,” Phil told him, rubbing his temples. He was beginning to regret not replacing the bottle of scotch that Maria had stolen. If the entire night was going to be like this, he wasn’t sure he could face it sober. Of course, he wasn’t entirely sure what he’d expected; this was what the last three meals he’d split with Jasper had been like. Phil couldn’t exactly plead ignorance at this point.

“I have concerns about Drew,” Jasper said, electing to pretend Phil hadn’t already told him no. “As an Avenger, I mean.”

“Do you have concerns about Drew, or do you have concerns about how a certain media conglomerate that shall remain nameless goes completely rabid the second they see a spider symbol?” Phil asked, flipping through the Heroes for Hire invoices. They were no less questionable than they had been before he’d gotten some food in his stomach, Jasper’s confidence in HR aside. “Because I seem to be handling most of the PR foul-ups lately, anyway.”

Not that he necessarily minded, but there were only so many ways to say ‘no comment’ in English, and the last time he’d held a scheduled, non-emergency press conference he’d seen Christine Everhart passing out bingo cards with every single one of them, plus a free square. They were going to have to find a new shtick soon if they wanted the press to keep reporting their blatant deflections as answers.

“I have concerns about how a certain media conglomerate that shall remain nameless and goes completely rabid the second they see a spider symbol might react if Drew’s personal history were to ever come to light,” Jasper said, studying the logo on the his carton with an intensity usually reserved for new archaeological finds. “Strong, pressing, nightmarish concerns.”

“By personal history do you mean the mind-control pheromones, the off-books Oscorp cloning lab, the terrorist-cult sleep-away camp, or her attempts to unionize the analysts?”

“All of the above?” Jasper asked hesitantly.

Granted, Phil had had some reservations about Jessica transferring to the Avengers, but she’d passed tryouts with flying colors and gelled well with the rest of the team. And it was hardly like there were so many powered individuals who’d decided to pursue a career in law enforcement and disaster relief that they could afford to turn suitable candidates away. Phil was sympathetic to the feeling that they couldn’t turn around without tripping over some new enhancement or power, but the numbers didn’t bear out the perception. 

Of the people they had records on, the vast majority didn’t have powers with tactical applications. Most of the others had no interest in heroics, preferring to live normal lives or use their talents in the private sector or follow dreams that had nothing to do with their powers. The one suitable student they’d almost been able to poach from Xavier had begged off after landing a recording contract, much to Nick’s high-volume, obscenity-laced disappointment. If checkered pasts were suddenly going to be a barrier to joining the Avengers, they’d be down to Hope, Steve, Sam, and Carol in short order, and Jasper’s bet with Teresa about whether or not Nick had meant it when he’d talked about blackmailing the JCS into transferring James Rhodes onto the team permanently might finally get settled. 

As it was, Jessica had worked hard to overcome her unsavory origins, none of which had been her own doing or anything she could have helped, and Phil was willing to do whatever he could to make sure she had that opportunity, both because it was morally the right thing to do and because SHIELD couldn’t afford to waste willing agents with her skillset and abilities. 

“Your concerns are duly noted. Next item on the agenda.” Phil held up the expense report. “I’m not signing off on an entire case of whiskey. There’s no way that could have possibly been used responsibly as a field ration.”

Jasper shoved a piece of broccoli into his mouth. “What if they agree to split it with us?”

Phil frowned at him, and Jasper slouched down farther into the couch in defeat.

“Drew _likes_ you. She still has that Yankees hat you bought her.”

Phil had to work to keep the satisfaction off his face at that memory. It had been the first time Jess had been to a baseball game, and she’d spent the week beforehand studying like there would be a test at the end. By the end of the night she’d been bouncing in her seat and cheering over plays, everything but the game and her terrible stadium food forgotten. He hadn’t been able to thank Clint enough for getting them tickets.

“You know what she calls me? Agent Agent,” Jasper complained. “Like I’m such a suit that my last name is Agent. Or maybe being an agent is my sole defining characteristic. Something insulting, anyway.” He rubbed his scalp with his knuckles. “I haven’t had this much trouble with an asset since you made me wrangle Stark halfway through a Canadian forest.”

“You volunteered for that,” Phil reminded him. “Because you wanted to see the look on Ross’s face, if I recall.”

“And it was worth it,” he admitted, “but he was still an enormous pain in the ass. I’ve had an easier time babysitting guys who tried to kill me. Fortune cookie?”

“Cry me a river.” Phil tossed him both the cookies the order had come with. “You made twenty grand off that mission. Somehow.”

“Well.” Jasper squirmed. “I mean. Bars are good business, and having the only bar for fifty miles is practically a license to print money. I’d have been an idiot not to go halfsies with the guy running it. How was I supposed to know Stark was going to buy us out for double the asking price? What am I, psychic?”

Phil clicked his tongue. Tony had backed Jasper’s story up by being flabbergasted at the suggestion that Jasper had been a co-owner of the bar he’d bought and bulldozed in a fit of pique at Ross’s attitude. The appreciative, openly-impressed “That little weasel.” that Tony had muttered the second Nick was out of earshot had worried Phil more than all Tony’s late-night inventing sprees combined.

“Of course you’re not psychic.” Phil finished his rice and pushed the box away. “If you were psychic, you wouldn’t have had all those mysterious gambling losses to offset the foreign investment taxes that stunt netted you.” 

Jasper coughed and flushed. “You said you were willing to pretend that never happened if I’d stop talking about it. Which I did.”

“I said nothing of the sort. I asked you not to make me an accessory after the fact, if I’m recalling that conversation correctly.” It was a conversation they’d had repeatedly, over a number of different subjects. Whatever sympathy he had for Jasper on the subject of Jessica Drew was blunted by the certainty that she’d like Jasper once she got to know him, provided he gave her the time to do it. “None of which is making me think you can’t handle being called Agent Agent for a few months until Drew warms up to you.”

“But if she went back to a specialist slot, the Bugle would never have to know she existed,” Jasper retorted. He shoveled the last of the beef into his mouth. “And she’d probably be happier.”

“That’s debatable. What is not debatable is me asking her to give up something she worked hard for just because of a minor personality conflict and a grown man’s ongoing, above-the-fold meltdown,” Phil said firmly. “Not to mention if Spider-Man wins his lawsuit, the Bugle’s board will probably enforce a cease-and-desist rather than risk another settlement. One of the few benefits of a paper belonging to a publicly-traded company.” He tossed the expense report at Jasper. “And stop soliciting mercenaries.”

“Well, technically they’re caterers.”

Phil glared at him. “You said not ten minutes ago that you were sure HR knew what they were doing.”

“Caterers with hearts of gold,” Jasper added, his grin wobbling at the edges. “And that lawsuit’s a bust. Some community-college hard-luck case of a freelancer got swept up as a co-defendant because he took most of the Bugle’s pictures, and Spider-Man’s apparently too good and pure to sue a teenage orphan just trying to pay his tuition.”

He made a face, and Phil let himself laugh. There was no way Jasper could possibly care that much about the situation, but he still managed to look personally offended by Spider-Man’s inconvenient show of compassion.

“There’s no such thing as too good and pure when you’re talking about a vigilante with that suite of abilities,” Phil said. “At least Drew’s not offering to break into Jameson’s office and pheromone him into being okay with spider-people.”

“Oh my god, don’t even joke.” Jasper’s eyes widened, and Phil held up his hands in an attempt to placate him.

“You know, now that I think about it,” Jasper said slowly, his brows furrowing, “that’s not a bad thing to have in our back pockets, just in case.”

“Let’s just stick with your original reaction, why don’t we?” Phil asked.

“Fine, fine,” Jasper huffed. He broke the first fortune cookie. “Can you at least figure out what Barton and Morse are up to? They’re never not in some little rolling one-on-one meeting these days. I’m developing a negative conditioned response to the sound of her giggling. It’s, I don’t know, ominous. They’re _plotting_ something.”

Phil paused, trying and failing to arrange his face into a passable smile. Which was odd, because he’d never had difficulty being happy for Clint before, when it seemed like he was in a relationship that had a shot at lasting. Agency romances didn’t often work, but relationships with civilians practically never did. And Clint had always seemed to want something more out of a partner than just a casual lay, something closer to actual companionship. Finding someone outside government work meant they wouldn’t have the clearance to talk about much. Insofar as anyone could fit the bill for either Bobbi or Clint, they were perfect for each other.

“They’re not up to anything,” Phil explained, suddenly tired. If Jasper noticed a change in his mood, he either pretended not to or chalked it up to the long day. “They’ve dated before. They’re probably just taking advantage of the down-time for another fling.”

“That’s worse!” Jasper said. He picked the fortune out of the cookie, read it, and scowled. “‘Beware of a great opportunity about to present itself.’ See? Even the cookie knows this is bad news.”

Phil thought of Clint, smooth and fast as a snake when he’d snatched the finished voucher out of Phil’s hands and stuffed it under his pillow, beyond all hope of retrieval. Phil had assumed Clint had been asleep, or close enough to that he could offer it quietly, a token gesture toward acting in good faith, then tuck it away in his notebook when Clint didn’t answer. Something for the scrapbook, to remind himself of that hour when he’d stumbled into a twilight zone where Clint could talk about wanting a desk-jockey a decade his senior and neither of them would find it ridiculous. Instead he’d watched Clint cache the evidence of it with an interesting combination of horror, dread, and hope.

It had been a relief when no one had mentioned it the next day, or the day after. Phil had waited for the inevitable questions, the quick brush-off, the jokes. He’d realized the gravity of his error when he couldn’t help but wonder if Clint had meant it, some tiny, mad part of Phil’s heart latching onto the idea that he’d ever had a chance. He’d meant it when he’d said yes, was the problem. He’d meant it, and he shouldn’t have. Having the time and space to reason his brain back out of it in private was a blessing.

Had Clint even noticed it the next morning? Maybe Phil had one of the morning-shift nurses to thank, some angel of good sense sweeping through the ward after Phil had left to check on everyone else and before the rest of the menagerie had shown up for official visiting hours, or a sharp-eyed miracle-worker who’d seen it on the floor or sticking out of the bedding and disposed of it without comment.

Whatever had happened, it was presumably safe to forget about it now. If Clint hadn’t done anything or said anything in--Phil glanced at his desk calendar, his eyes moving back over dates until he hit Clint’s discharge from medical--eighteen days, he certainly wasn’t going to now. And with Clint’s attentions focused on Bobbi, Phil was sure that, one way or another, the note had wound up in the trash where it belonged. The only thing he had to do now was talk himself out of the inconveniently persistent feeling that he might have finally run out of luck.

Phil clicked his tongue and gave Jasper as cheerful a look as he could manage. “This is a net positive, trust me. They’re good for each other.”

Jasper waved the fortune in the air. “The cookie has spoken, Phil.”

“You’re overreacting,” Phil said, finally managing a facsimile smirk at Jasper’s outrage over a mass-produced prediction with lottery numbers printed on the back. They’d known each other long enough that he could fumble his way through the expected reactions even if he wasn’t feeling anything but winded by the news. “Deliberately.”

“This is a perfectly normal reaction to finding out that this is how I’m going to die. Goodbye, dreams of saving the president from an assassin the Secret Service couldn’t stop and getting a televised state funeral.”

“That’s a very specific dream,” Phil observed. He bundled up the leftovers and tried not to read too much into Jasper’s theatrics.

“I always pictured it like, I’m on my lunch break or something, some situation where I just happen to be there, and I could walk away, but I don’t, because I’m a goddamn American hero. Because I see the entire Secret Service down and bleeding, and an assassin stalking toward the President of the United States, and I tackle him. Epic hand-to-hand fight ensues, I go down fighting, giving the president time to get to safety.”

“So that was barely scratching the surface of how much thought you’ve put into this,” Phil snorted.

“Juan Felipe Herrera gives my eulogy,” Jasper continued. “The assassin’s last words are a request that he be told the name of his last and greatest opponent.”

“You know, this might actually meet clinical criteria.”

“But no,” Jasper said, undeterred. “No Juan Felipe Herrera eulogy. No first lady crying over my casket and comforting my mother. I’m going to be laid low by a pair of human wrecking balls, and Fury’s going to say something like ‘He died doing what he loved’ even if it was utterly stupid like falling down the fire stairs, and my mom’s going to insist I was an insurance adjuster this whole time out of spite even though she knows I’m secretly a superspy. I’m going to wind up with my cover story on my tombstone.”

He pulled one of the couch cushions down on top of his face with a groan.

“You’re a highly-trained government operative,” Phil reminded him. He’d pick up the biggest bottle of scotch he could find on the way home tonight, and he’d figure out someplace to hide it where Maria wouldn’t look, no matter how many times Nick ended an argument with ‘The world needs superheroes.’

“So are they, and I’m only one man,” Jasper said through the cushion. “There’s two of them.”

“You’ve been in firefights more often than you’ve been to theme parks.”

“I’ve only been to four theme parks, and one of them might not count because it was just a big Bass Pro Shop. I had a very deprived childhood.”

“You’ve fought a robot mountain lion bare-handed,” Phil continued. Granted, it had not been a particularly dignified or necessary fight, but it had happened.

“I think they prefer to be called animatronic,” Jasper said. “And it scarred me for life. To this day I can’t set foot in a sporting goods store without getting the shakes.”

“You dated a Maggia boss for three months.”

“For an investigation!”

“Which is why, when Fury found out about it and ordered you to stop dating her, you told him that you were in love, that he was too old to understand what you two had, and that he wasn’t your real dad anyway?” Phil asked.

“I take my undercover work very seriously,” Jasper mumbled.

“You’re not allowed to hide under a pillow because two agents are dating.”

“I am when it’s Barton and a woman who’s basically Barton with better operational awareness and a worse temper.”

“You’re getting duck sauce and crumbs all over my upholstery.”

Jasper lifted the cushion far enough to roll his eyes at Phil. “I already did that and you know it.”

Phil forced himself to relax a few degrees. Somehow Jasper having a tantrum made the small pangs of jealousy and loss he couldn’t quite brush away seem less of a personal failing. They’d fade under the harsh light of reality. They always did. And in the meantime, everyone had a bad day here and there. Judging himself too harshly over it was just as foolish as harboring feelings for a man so far out of his league, and at least he wasn’t burrowing into a sofa over it.

“What’s Barton ever done that warrants this sort of reaction, really?” Phil asked gently. Compared to the things Jasper pulled and saw no problem with, Clint’s occasional run of clusterfuck missions was hardly beyond the pale, especially since agents with Clint’s skills and clearance level didn’t get sent on milk runs.

“He sent Stark up a decommissioned elevator shaft into a nest of those creepy ptero-drones coming out of Madripoor because, and I quote, ‘they’d never see something this stupid coming.’ He calculated the trajectory for Wilson and Rogers when they did that zip-line thing that shouldn’t have worked and definitely shouldn’t have been attempted. That AIM job that got fubared so badly it registered on the Richter scale? His idea.” Jasper let the cushion fall back onto his face and groaned loudly.

“Jasper, none of that’s true,” Phil said.

“What?”

“Did you not hear me because you’re hiding under a pillow like a child, or are you asking me to clarify?” Phil asked, propping his chin on his hand.

“The second one.” Jasper propped the cushion up and glared at Phil, suspicious. “I heard you lecturing every last one of those idiots about why they can’t just listen to Barton when he comes up with an off-the-cuff plan like that, because somebody’s going to get killed.”

Phil rubbed his eyes. “You weren’t even in the same time zone for any of that.”

“On comm-recordings,” Jasper explained irritably. “You know, I do review logs when the misreps read like a Goofus and Gallant story. Or when everybody went out of their way to leave stuff out and use the passive voice and ‘mistakes were made’ shows up more than once.”

“Which I appreciate,” Phil said, a thin cover for the fact that he’d somehow missed it. He’d known Jasper would have some method of keeping tabs on actions that happened while he was tied up elsewhere, but he hadn’t thought they’d be so time-intensive. “But in these particular cases, they got lectures about plans that had nothing to do with Barton. Stark somehow got it into his head that I wouldn’t yell at him if he said he was just following Barton’s or Romanov’s orders.”

Jasper’s expression turned thoughtful. “Well. He’s not _wrong_.”

“Yes, he is,” Phil said firmly. That Clint and Natasha’s seemingly-reckless behavior was underpinned by years of training and field experience while Tony’s was underpinned by years of self-destructive behavior and absurdly close calls that had somehow, in defiance of all fairness or common sense, turned out all right was a matter of record. “In any case, some of the more observant Avengers picked up on what he’s doing and started keeping it as a fallback.”

“And you’ve been letting them skate because why, exactly?”

“I’ve been trying to think of them as less lies and more teaching opportunities,” Phil said. He had shut down the attempts at framing Natasha as a plan’s author when she clearly hadn’t been, mostly because she’d have done it herself, in private and possibly with a bit of overkill, if he hadn’t. Clint was far less likely to find out about it and would be far more forgiving in the event he did. “Hence the lectures on exactly where they went wrong with their plans and why they can’t blindly trust senior agents to the point of turning off their brains or causing enormous explosions with no clear extraction plan for when the building starts collapsing as a result.”

In defense of the charade, it did seem to be working. Tony was making fewer of the same mistakes, and Steve and Sam had adjusted their techniques accordingly. He wasn’t sure about Hope, since the AIM incident had been a one-off to begin with, an overreaction to seeing Steve down and bleeding and their air-support still five minutes out. With Tony especially, once he had to at least pretend to listen as a confidant under the guise of the lecture being directed at someone else, he did seem to be internalizing the theory more thoroughly.

“So I’m not going to die horribly because he and Morse are combining forces?” Jasper asked, his voice tinged with hope.

“If you die horribly, it’s not going to be because of them dating,” Phil said, his lips twitching up. There were more than enough real threats waiting to punch through armor or blow out an engine or slip in under the radar when everyone’s attention was elsewhere, and he could hardly tell Jasper differently. They both knew it would be a lie. But it was equally pointless to fixate on imaginary dangers in that context.

“None of what I’ve been chalking up to Barton has actually been Barton?” Jasper asked, almost smiling.

“Well, probably not none,” Phil hedged. There had been a few truly jaw-dropping moments in recent memory which had begun and ended with Clint. “I have a list of the things that definitely weren’t him, if you want it.”

“You have a list. Barton’s not a menace unleashed on the world by forces beyond the ken of man, but you felt the need to start and maintain a list of things that definitely were not his fault.” Jasper retreated back under the pillow and mumbled something Phil thought was, “This is why I don’t trust your judgment.”

Phil considered adding that he sat down with Natasha once a month and reviewed the list for accuracy, then decided against it.

“Open the second cookie,” he said instead. “Maybe it’ll have better news.”

Jasper shoved the cushion back, grumbling, and sat up. He made a show of unwrapping the cookie and cracking it in half, then made an even bigger show of reading it. After a few seconds, his expression shifted from petulance to defeat.

“Well?” Phil asked, curious in spite of himself.

“Remember the fate of the early worm.”

“Ominous,” Phil said.

Jasper scowled at the way he was barely biting back a laugh, picked up the rejected expense report, and threw it back to him. “Sign it. Trust me, we’re going to need that hooch.”


	3. Chapter 3

“Say cheese!” Skye chirped, grinning.

Phil barely tamped down a real smile at seeing her so pleased with herself, and he could only assume the half-second between the warning and the shutter-click had given him just enough time to look like an idiot. “You cannot possibly need another picture of me.”

She dumped her equipment onto the conference table and started setting up, her hands flying over cables and devices almost faster than he could track. He wondered about the possibility of getting her an internship with Tony’s R&D division. If he waited until she had another six months of good behavior under her belt before he went back to Nick with the pitch, Phil was willing to bet the response would be better than the ‘get out of my office’ he’d gotten last time. She was already taking initiative on projects like this one, and the frustrated need of hers to fix the world was, historically, what had driven some of their best agents.

“How else am I going to lure Academy fashionistas to my blog?” Skye asked with a sly look. 

She fired everything up, and suddenly the picture she’d taken was six feet high and in living color on the far wall. Phil nodded to himself. He looked like an idiot, all right. The rest of it wasn’t terribly flattering, either. He was showing his age, and he’d never been much of a heartbreaker to begin with. At least it helped with cover stories, he thought. And not rating a second look made it easier to fade into the background.

“You don’t have a blog,” he pointed out, looking away from the picture. He settled into his customary position at the foot of the table, with a clear view of the door, and set his phone to silent. The rest of the group would be filing in soon. The feed died when she disconnected her own phone, and she tapped away at it before sliding it back in her pocket with a look of impish delight.

“When I start my blog,” she amended. He sighed. “No, not the Level Six Huff of Disapproval! My only weakness!”

“Please do not start a blog featuring SHIELD agents, SHIELD facilities, or SHIELD existing,” Phil told her firmly. “And there’s no such thing as the Level Six Huff of Disapproval. That’s a myth that Sitwell encourages for unknowable reasons of his own.”

“Did you ever consider that I might have taken up scrapbooking?” Skye asked. She adjusted a setting on the projector, and her slideshow appeared where his picture had just been. “Or that I just want a photo album documenting this momentous period of change in my young life?”

“If I thought either of those were true, I’d be thrilled,” Phil said. A scrapbook wouldn’t be the strangest thing to get classified status lately, and going through life with few moorings and nothing to call a family hadn’t been good for her. He could only hope it hadn’t done permanent damage, and that developing close ties with her fellow-agents was the beginning of a new and healthier way of moving through the world. “But you never take anyone else’s picture.”

“Nobody else lets me take their picture,” she protested. “Jemma developed a personal signal-jammer to keep me from photographing her, because security. Did you know she wants to go undercover someday?”

“I did, yes.” He wasn’t sure of the wisdom of such a career trajectory, but that was what training, progress benchmarks, and dry-runs were for. 

“Leo lets me, but he also turns lobster-red and gets this deer-in-the-headlights look whenever he sees a camera come out,” Skye continued, shaking her head. She prowled around the room, checking sightlines and nudging cable-covers to make sure they were secure. “And then he tries to cover for it by faking a weird smile, and then he looks like a psychotic clown. I’ve taken dozens of pictures, and not one of them has been a keeper. I mean, for real. Have you seen his driver’s license? Not a good look. How did you even get a decent picture for his SHIELD ID?”

“We took it without telling him when he was getting his retinal scan,” Phil admitted. The tech who’d come up with the plan had been adamant about the entire point of having a photograph on someone’s ID card being to successfully identify them by sight as well as biometrics, a point defeated by the agent in question looking like a socially awkward sugar beet in every picture he knew was being taken.

“Bobbi somehow always knows the exact right angle to put her hand at so I get a big middle finger instead of her face, and Sharon pulls kind of the same trick only with turning her head. Which, okay, I’d probably do that too if I had miles of gorgeous blond hair that always drapes just _so_ , but eventually it just looks like I’m working with Cousin It if I keep putting those in the album. And the last time I tried taking a picture of May, she literally grabbed my phone and threw it out the window.”

Skye frowned and considered the arrangement of the snack-trays Phil had positioned around the table.

“Don’t even think about it,” he warned. “The last thing you want is people’s attention wandering because they’re trying to work out how to get the last cruller when it’s eight feet away and right in front of someone who’s guaranteed to decide they want it the second someone else expresses interest.”

“Please, Coulson, we’re all adults here,” Skye snorted. She circled the table and straightened the agendas he’d left at each chair instead, not bothering to suppress a little tsk of distaste as she did so. She’d worked a pointed slide into the presentation about SHIELD not needing so much paper if the wireless was reliable enough for everyone to open their email and get at their attachments during meetings. It was illustrated with a picture of a clear-cut rain forest with a pathetic-looking capuchin sitting on a tree stump.

“Adults who’ve chosen a profession that involves cunning, duplicity, and quite frequently a great deal of physical violence,” Phil reminded her. “Those trays weren’t arranged so much as strategically deployed to minimize casualties.”

Skye gave him a look he’d come to interpret as her trying to decide whether or not to believe him, and he watched her internal debate with an expression of carefully calculated serenity.

“Enough of these meetings, and you notice patterns. Also something we adults do.”

“Yeah, yeah, fine. The donuts will remain undisturbed,” she said, holding her hands up in surrender.

“Thank you. And Melinda did not throw your phone out a window for trying to take her picture,” Phil said mildly.

“Okay, she _figuratively_ grabbed my phone and threw it out the window,” Skye told him.

“That doesn’t even make sense.”

“While she was being an adult who’s spent a lifetime in the sort of business where donut proxy-wars are vicious and inevitable,” Skye added, smirking.

“So you’ve been putting together team keepsake albums featuring nothing but me, in front of bland backdrops, that you then immediately have to tag and file? That’s your story?” He cocked his head and watched her for a reaction. She didn’t seem flustered in the least, and he wondered why it had to be Jemma instead of her that was so hell bent on undercover work.

“Well, I guess the jig’s finally up. Nothing to do now but tell you all about my nefarious plan,” Skye said. “I’ve been secretly repurposing your dorky ties for wallpaper patterns. I’ve got an off-books factory in Vietnam flooding the market with tiny-palm-tree print as we speak. It’s huge in Japan. I’ve been using the money to fund my lavish lifestyle and run smear campaigns targeting my many enemies. They’ll rue the day they didn’t share their lunchables with me in fourth grade, oh yes.”

Her fake posturing was both the most ridiculous thing he’d seen since Leo had tried to smooth-talk Fury’s secretary and not a half-bad imitation of the last two people they’d arrested. Phil tried not to betray his amusement; it only encouraged her. Skye dropped the pose in favor of glaring at the chairs like they were defying her, then began adjusting the amount of space between each of them until she was satisfied.

“That makes even less sense,” he told her. “And nobody says ‘rue the day’ anymore.”

“Oh?” she asked, pulling the last chair into alignment.

“Too ‘60s Lex Luthor. Modern supercriminals are all about convincing everyone they’re saving the world by destroying half of it.”

“Well, I believe in transparency in stateless social subversion.” She stalked her way back to the head of the table and squinted at the projection uneasily. “Does the image look blurry to you?”

“Skye, relax,” Phil said gently. “You’re going to do fine.”

“But Hill’s going to be here!” she protested. “And it’s like I’m jinxed. Every time I try to impress her, it backfires and I look like a jerk.”

“So don’t try to impress her,” Phil chuckled. “Just try to do your job. You’ve given this presentation to Fitz and Simmons twice in the last day. Your stuffed animals could probably give this presentation themselves by now if they had to.”

“That was one time,” Skye groaned. “One time! And I only used them as a test-audience so I could cash in on the sweet photo-op afterwards. It’s not every day Mr. Whiskers attends talks delivered by an undergrad.”

“Tell you what,” Phil said, shaking his head.

“If you say we can go out for ice cream if I bomb this, I’m holding you to it and ordering something with every topping available.” She crossed her arms. “Don’t think you’ll weasel out of it with a rain check or a popsicle from an ice-cream truck.”

“Well, we can if you want. But I was going to say that after this is wrapped up--one way or another--you could put together a task force to investigate the reports we’ve received of a young woman who can control squirrels.”

Phil put his copy of the agenda on top of a notepad and tapped them on the table to align their edges. If there was a better way of getting Skye past go-time jitters than putting a new project on the horizon, he had yet to find it. When he looked back up, Skye was watching him warily.

“That’s just mean, Coulson.”

“I am completely and absolutely in earnest,” he said, laying the notepad back down.

“You’re telling me that, for real, spy’s honor, there’s a girl out there who can command legions of squirrels?” she demanded.

“That there have been reports of a girl who can command legions of squirrels,” Phil clarified, “and that, if she exists, SHIELD would like to know more about her.”

“And that I get to find her.”

“Once we’re done here, yes.”

Skye did a tiny fist-pump, then darted across the room to hug him. Phil patted her awkwardly on the back, only to hear Maria clear her throat from the doorway. Skye straightened back up, flushing slightly but still smiling.

“Deputy Director Hill, ma’am, thank you for joining us today!” Skye saluted, impervious to Maria’s suspicion about the sincerity of the gesture.

Everyone else began to straggle in after her, and Skye looked them over happily, assessing everyone’s mood like Bobbi had taught her. Jemma and Leo both gave her a small thumbs-up, and Jemma was even almost covert about it. Melinda exchanged restrained nods with Maria, then shot Phil a barely-there smile over Skye’s enthusiasm. Sharon was all business, as usual, a tablet and several casefiles tucked in the crook of one elbow. She seemed too busy ignoring Bobbi’s detailed and animated description of how Italian grenade safeties had accidentally turned the tide of a battle with HYDRA forces in Salerno to notice Skye sneaking her picture, but Phil was impressed to see her turn her shoulders at the last minute, giving Skye a clear view of her loose ponytail and left ear and obscuring her face.

Bobbi claimed her normal spot across from Phil and slung a fitted leather jacket with magenta piping across the back of the chair before sitting down. Phil recognized it as one of Clint’s favorites and pretended not to notice the sharp twinge in his chest. It had gotten harder to ignore the occasional, inconvenient flash of want since that night in medical, but Phil had grimly outlasted more than one such episode. He focused on Bobbi’s face instead, the way she seemed happier and more at ease than she’d been in months.

“Back me up on this, Coulson,” Bobbi said, elbowing Sharon. “The Italians overbuilt something for once, and the Germans never saw it coming.”

Sharon raised her eyebrows, and Phil agreed. “Two pins. The HYDRA soldiers pulled the one in the normal location. The Allied commandos picked them up, pulled the second one, and threw them back.”

“Told you,” Bobbi said. Sharon barely managed to keep from rolling her eyes, and Phil was pleased to see her softening a little toward her teammates. If she had a flaw, it was keeping people at too much of a distance. Her expectations of herself were sky-high, and it wasn’t easy for her to find her off switch. She reminded him a little of Natasha, back when Clint had first talked her into joining SHIELD, the idea of having a personal life and being able to find joy in her work still unthinkable.

Skye cleared her throat, her gaze roving the room in one last attempt to take the group’s temperature. Once she was sure she had everyone’s attention, she clicked to the first slide. It was helpfully titled ‘No more dead zones: dragging SHIELD into the 21st century,’ and Phil covered his mouth to hide his smile at the way Maria’s eyebrows climbed toward her hairline.

“Welcome to the new wifi order, ladies and gentlemen,” Skye said, her eyes gleaming. “If you’ll take a moment to check your agendas, we can get started as soon as you’re ready.”

*****

Phil woke reluctantly, sure it had only been five minutes since he’d closed his eyes. He checked his phone. Four hours. Not the worst night’s sleep he’d ever gotten, but it hadn’t exactly been for the best reasons. A sharp knock on the door told him why he’d woken up, and he stifled a groan. The sun was barely up. The only reason anyone would be banging on his office door at this hour was some new emergency. At least it couldn’t possibly have been another one of Fitz-Simmons’s robots crashing into a power cable. They’d been banned from using them around the bundles after the second one they’d destroyed.

Phil pulled himself off the couch and flipped on the lights, squinting groggily at the sudden brightness. There was a protein bar in the desk, and there would be coffee in the lounge. Whatever it was, he could deal with it.

Phil opened the door to Jasper’s wide grin and glittering eyes and immediately realized he’d been wrong.

“I brought breakfast!” Jasper said quickly, wedging his shoulder against the door as Phil tried to slam it in his face.

“I don’t care,” Phil grunted. Jasper had expected the move and braced himself, which was a bad sign, and Phil didn’t think he could get the door latched and locked from this position. It was a losing battle. “It can’t possibly be worth it.”

“It’s fancy pancakes! From that diner you really like!”

Phil closed his eyes and tried to reason his way through his weakening resolve. It definitely wouldn’t be worth it, if Jasper had felt the need to sweeten the pot keenly enough to walk a ten-block round trip in this weather. But if Phil wasn’t going to win, at least he’d get something out of it. “Okay, fine. I give. I’m going to stop pushing on the door. Please don’t spill food all over my floor like you did last summer.”

The smell of sriracha had lingered for two months, and the cleaning crew had eventually told him it was in his head and not the carpet.

“You promise it’s not just a trick to get me to stop pushing so you can lock me out?” Jasper asked.

“I’ve only ever done that once, and it was for a very good reason.” Phil tried to remember the last time his life had been normal and drew a blank. “And yes, I promise.”

“On three?”

Phil closed his eyes. It could be worse, he told himself. Jasper could be empty-handed. It could be Maria storming in to tell him Skye had restored their wifi access but somehow killed every other base’s in the process. It could be Thor with news of yet another long-lost Asgardian superweapon being spotted in a magician’s stage act.

“On three,” Phil agreed. He might as well get it over with, and whatever Jasper wanted couldn’t possibly be that bad. None of the fire alarms were going off, and Nick wasn’t on the PA giving a thunderous evacuation order.

“One, two, _three_.”

Jasper stopped trying to bull the door open as Phil stopped trying to shove it closed, and Phil had the momentary, mad impulse to slam it shut anyway when he caught the deeply satisfied look on Jasper’s face. Phil’s shoulders slumped. It was Jasper. Of course it could be that bad.

Jasper straightened his tie, cracked his neck, and presented the bag full of styrofoam clamshells like a peace offering. “Chocolate-chip banana and blueberry cinnamon. Pick your poison.”

“That’s a deeply unfortunate phrase to have gone with,” Phil said. He pulled the button-down he’d worn yesterday over his A-shirt and resisted the urge to rub the scar on his chest. It itched and ached, and it would be fine after a hot shower if only he could keep from making it worse in the meantime.

“No need to get all gussied up on my account,” Jasper snorted, shoving one of the boxes at him.

Phil opened it, and his stomach growled. Chocolate-chip banana. Dinner last night had been a stale sandwich from the cafeteria’s grab-and-go cooler, edible but unsatisfying and a sharp contrast to the pancakes with a side of bacon sitting in front of him now. The Chipped Mug’s breakfast plates were heart attacks waiting to happen, but they could single-handedly make a bad morning better. He dumped the whole cup of syrup over them before he could think better of it, and Jasper hummed contentedly as he set the box of coffee on the desk.

“Just so you know, I did ask, but it turns out they don’t have an IV hookup compatible with this spigot.” Jasper looked around for cups. “Do I need to raid the cafeteria? The prep cooks should be in by now. I bet I could wheedle at least a pair of ramekins or something.”

“What’s the special occasion?” Phil asked, digging a pair of tumblers out of a drawer.

Jasper feigned offended innocence. “Can’t I just be a good friend who heard about you being personally responsible for both the robot uprising and the rolling wireless failure and thought you might need cheering up?”

“Well, yes, that’s theoretically a possibility,” Phil allowed blandly.

“I brought you pancakes,” Jasper said, glaring. “Be nice.”

“It was just the wireless, and Skye and Fitz-Simmons had the new and much-improved version up by one o’clock. They needed a few minutes to get the hang of the drones they retrofitted to run the wiring for the new nodes, that’s all.” Phil poured him a cup of coffee and passed it across the desk. “Hill saying nobody was going home until she didn’t have to plug her tablet into the wall like a Russian was her having an abundance of caution.”

“I’m also pretty sure she didn’t mean it literally,” Jasper pointed out. “For one thing, everyone else lives on base and is technically already home. Which isn’t a bad idea, since that way they’re not paying through the nose for an apartment and then still sleeping on a couch old enough to hold a graduate degree. The commute’s not bad, either.”

Phil’s attempt to look annoyed was foiled by the first bite of pancake. It was a marked improvement over the powerbar in his desk. He inhaled the rest, too hungry and too suspicious of Jasper’s motives to have much consideration for table manners.

“I sometimes enjoy seeing the outside world when it’s not on fire, crawling with Monsanto’s latest escapees, or being attacked by mechanical nightmares. Call it a personality flaw.”

“Yeah, yeah. Your squaresville excuses are hereby acknowledged.” Jasper wrinkled his nose. “If you ever get sick enough of government work to look for private-sector work, my mom’s got positions for a few good men.”

Phil stuck his fork in the pancakes and rubbed his jaw, watching Jasper’s face for even the barest trace of self-awareness. He found none.

“It turns out guarding the elderly’s a growth industry,” Jasper continued, oblivious. “She took my suggestion. I guess the homeowners’ association was a little dicey about the services she was offering, said it was overkill, but she’ll be making a tidy profit at a cheaper billing-rate than industry standard, so she’s looking to expand. We could get in on the ground floor of securing the nation’s old people.”

Jasper looked up to find Phil watching him in quiet horror and grunted irritably.

“Whatever, just pretend I said it in a way that didn’t sound like we’d be stockpiling grandmas in secret locations.”

“You remember that part of the oath that went ‘all enemies, foreign and domestic’?” Phil asked.

“My mother is not a domestic enemy, and she’s got a stack of official disavowals from the CIA to prove it,” Jasper snapped, waving his fork around. He poked at his pancakes and scrunched his nose. “Can I have your leftover syrup?”

“Um.” Phil held up the empty container.

“Wow. The one time I ask, and it’s the one time you’ve gone for broke on it.” Jasper’s face fell. “Anyway. Since you’re going to insist on not seizing the opportunity of a lifetime…”

Phil waited for him to finish, then caught the question in his expression.

“Will you quit making me regret opening the door and just spit it out already?” Phil asked, defeated.

“I think I’ve come up with a solution to our Barton-Morse problem that doesn’t involve joining the Sitwell Security Administration.”

Phil almost choked on his coffee. “She cannot call it that.”

“I checked, and it turns out she can call it that,” Jasper sighed. “Even if she uses a fancy font that’s a little hard to read if your eyes are going.”

“And there is no ‘Barton-Morse problem.’ Barton and Morse dating isn’t a problem. We’ve been over this.” Phil picked at the sludge of crumbs and syrup sticking to the bottom of the container.

“No, you decided unilaterally that it isn’t a problem,” Jasper said. “I registered a formal complaint at my vote being ignored, and the UN’s reviewing my case. And I expect to prevail, because it’s getting worse. I can’t live like this, Phil. Three weeks, this has been going on! Morse can barely say one word to him without him blushing red as a fire engine, and every other thing he says to her has her cracking up. And Romanov is encouraging them. It’s terrifying.”

Phil covered his mouth with the glass full of coffee and counted himself lucky that Jasper was paying more attention to his breakfast than to Phil’s reaction. The image Jasper had conjured was a sweet one, and Phil hoped they could made it work this time. He still hadn’t been able to completely shake the sting of it, though, and it was too early in the morning to effectively hide the fact that he was affected.

“It sounds like they’re happy,” Phil said after a moment. “That’s generally something we try to encourage in agents’ personal lives where possible.”

“They’re a disaster waiting to happen,” Jasper told him. “But, like I said, I’ve got a solution.”

“And that is?” Phil rubbed his eyes, reasonably sure he didn’t want to hear the answer. But the sooner he talked Jasper down, the sooner they could forget the entire conversation. Of all the things he’d been hoping to avoid today, somehow he hadn’t even considered the possibility that writing a memo on Jasper’s mother would make the list.

Jasper grinned, made a pair of quick finger-gun gestures at Phil, then blew smoke from the pretend barrels and pantomimed holstering them.

“Jasper,” Phil said slowly, “please remember that I’m running on half a night’s sleep and five times the daily recommended allowance of sugar. You’re going to want to use words.”

“You!” Jasper exclaimed, exasperated. “You’re the solution!”

“I’m not ordering Morse to stop seeing Barton,” Phil said, grimacing. “This is even worse than you suggesting Drew--”

“No, of course not, that would be a gross abuse of authority,” Jasper said, looking appropriately horrified.

“Thank you for that small glimmer of sanity.”

“Not to mention that if I wanted to go that route, I could just tell Barton to stop seeing Morse,” Jasper continued.

“And it’s snuffed right back out,” Phil muttered.

Jasper’s eyes narrowed, and he pulled out his phone and took a picture. “Ethics-face redux.”

Phil rested his chin on his hands. “I’m about ten seconds from throwing you out of my office. Just so we’re on the same page here.”

“What I mean is that you could just sort of subtly like make a pass at Barton, or Morse, or both of them--” Jasper stopped and tossed his head sharply. “No, not both of them, that would just make everything worse. Forget I listed that as an option.” He looked back up. “Anyway, like I was saying, make a pass at one of them, and break them up naturally.”

He sat back and waited for what he clearly thought would be an appreciative reaction. Phil considered the possibility that this was an ill-conceived prank, weighing it carefully against the feverish gleam in Jasper’s eyes. On the one hand, this was five different kinds of inappropriate, even for Jasper. On the other hand, Jasper didn’t really go in for practical jokes.

“I’m going to ask you something, and I want you to think about it very carefully, okay?” Phil asked, trying to keep his tone neutral.

Jasper crossed his arms and waited, his lips thinning.

“Are you feeling all right?”

“Of course I’m--”

“I meant it when I said think very carefully,” Phil interrupted.

Jasper took a deep breath and slouched in his chair. “You know how every so often you get those couples where separately they’re more or less fine? Quiet, basically law-abiding, maybe a little weird but nothing sinister? They go their whole lives without so much as a blip on the radar until one day they meet, and fall for each other, and suddenly they’re blazing across the country leaving a trail of dead five miles wide in their wake?”

“Yes, I’m aware of the murder-couple phenomenon,” Phil said drily. It had been difficult to entirely block out the true-crime marathon their last stake-out together had turned into once it became painfully obvious that the only thing the vacationing cartel accountants they’d been assigned to keep eyes on were doing was each other.

“Well, these are two people who are already very dangerous,” Jasper said, as if that explained everything.

“Trust me, Jasper. I’ve known them both a very long time.” Phil sat back and drank his coffee. “They’re more stable together, not less. They check each other’s worst impulses, they hold each other accountable, and they challenge each other to do better. It’s not a bomb and a detonator getting together.”

“What about Dubai?” Jasper asked.

“That was them breaking up, which yes, is something of a problem,” Phil allowed. “That part doesn’t go well. But your plan, aside from being completely laughable where it’s not a textbook hostile work environment, would make that part worse instead of better. There is absolutely no reason to interfere with their personal relationship in the absence of concrete, take-it-to-HR evidence that it’s causing a performance problem. You follow me?”

“Maybe. A little.” Jasper dug a pair of sausage links out from under the last of his pancakes. “I’m stealing your Tahiti plan if you’re wrong, though. Assuming they don’t drop an ice machine on me.”

“An ice machine?” Phil asked, knowing he’d regret it.

“A guy I was bringing in tried to do that once. One of those big, free-standing ones?” Jasper shoved half a sausage in his mouth and then waved the fork at Phil. “It was awful. They’re top-heavy, and just plain heavy, and then when they spill there’s ice everywhere, so it’s like the worst kind of slapstick while you’re fighting for your life with the guy who just tried to kill you. It was that guy with the Dr. Doom Halloween-costume cape and the fishbowl on his head, which just made it so much worse.”

“Mysterio?”

“Yeah, that’s what he was calling himself.” Jasper nodded. “Guy in the dumbest get-up of all time trying to choke you out while hollering at the top of his lungs about revenge, and he sounds like a dog howling into a bucket, and both of you are slipping and sliding all over the place. I still have nightmares about it.” He fixed Phil with a hard stare. “If that’s how I go out, because I’m trusting you to be right about this and recognize that I might get burned on that, I need you to make sure the story everyone gets is the saving-the-president thing. Doctor photos and stage the funeral if you have to. Tell them I went out fighting that Russian guy Ross turned loose on Harlem.”

“Blonsky?”

Jasper clicked his tongue and pointed at Phil. “Yeah, that fucker. Tell them I went out saving the president from Emil ‘The Abomination’ Blonsky in a bare-knuckle brawl. That I won.”

“You’ve been having nightmares?” Phil asked casually, refilling his coffee.

“Not like _that_ ,” Jasper snapped, waving dismissively. “This isn’t PTSD or some shit. Like, you know how you knew Stark was Iron Man before he even got back stateside, and you knew that hammer was going to be a problem the second you clapped eyes on it, and you knew Skye was a good risk thirty minutes after meeting her? This is me knowing this is the sort of power-couple nobody needs in their lives.”

Phil debated pointing out that it hadn’t taken unusual levels of intuition to correctly interpret witnesses reporting a robot attack or an unmovable alien artifact in the middle of a crater, or that the jury was still out on Skye. Jasper seemed to have calmed down a little, though, and Phil was reluctant to probe too deeply. 

If he could keep Jasper tractable, Phil could probably convince him to schedule a few visits with one of the counselors to talk about whatever was really eating at him just to prove Phil wrong on the PTSD front. Maybe the Avengers hadn’t been the right assignment for him after all. For all Jasper’s experience and personal rapport with most of the team, he was more habituated to pick-up teams and on-the-fly mission parameters. The predictability of daily operations might be contributing to him looking for threats in new and unusual places, subconsciously convinced things couldn’t be that easy.

Jasper finished his sausage and sucked at his teeth. “And what, exactly, is so laughable about my plan? It’s a great plan. It would totally work.”

“At least you’re not in the woods about it creating a hostile work environment,” Phil scoffed.

“Well, I mean, there’s a reason I said be subtle about it,” Jasper said, shrugging. “And it’d be a hostile work environment to prevent a catastrophe, so I feel like that’s a more excusable reason than a CO just being a total--what did Skye call Ross after those transcripts got leaked?”

“The military-industrial complex with erectile dysfunction?”

“Wow.” Jasper whistled, then chuckled to himself. “I’m writing that one down.”

“At what point in your career could you possibly have a need for something like that?” Phil demanded. 

“Are you kidding? I have a very long list of people who’ll be getting pithy, eviscerating open letters if and when Operation Slow Boat to the South Pacific launches. I’ll have you know I can be a fantastically petty man when the mood strikes me and the stakes are low enough.” Jasper drained his coffee and groaned when the box only had a half-cup left in it. “But no, it was after that.”

“Four-star fascist?” Phil hazarded. Skye’s righteous fury on behalf of Bruce, Betty, and the entire city of New York had been long-winded and invective-laden. “Desert-camo dumpster-fire? Total trashcan of a human being?”

“That one,” Jasper said. “It’s a more excusable reason than a CO just being a total trashcan of a human being. But I still don’t see why you think it’s so obvious that it wouldn’t work.”

Phil fixed him with a long look and ran his fingers through his receding hair. “Jasper.”

“Don’t ‘Jasper’ me. Come on, put up or shut up. It’s a great plan.”

“Unless I radically misunderstood what you were trying to say, it relies on one of a pair of extremely attractive soldier-spies in their physical and mental prime, who are currently in a sexual relationship with one another, being susceptible to a honeypot where the bait in question would be me,” Phil said. “Did I miss anything?”

“No, that’s about the long and short of it.” Jasper steepled his fingers and waited for Phil to continue.

“And you don’t see at least one fatal flaw in that plan?” Phil prompted, spreading his hands. 

He didn’t need a mirror, or a candid photo blown up to mammoth proportions and projected onto a wall, to know what he looked like. Before the helicarrier, he’d kept in decent shape for an agent who spent as much time as he did behind the wheel or behind a desk. The injury, the surgeries, the recovery--all of it had tipped the scale in the desk’s favor. It had put some gray in his beard, too, given him that much extra reason to stay clean-shaven. The crow’s feet were etched deeper. The bags under his eyes took more sleep to get rid of. He looked old, fragile. In the field it could turn into an asset just as easily as a liability, but in the bedroom?

Jasper frowned, considering the question without looking at him, then looked up. “Wait, are you secretly terrible at honeypots? Because it would be intensely comforting to find one thing you’re bad at.”

“That’s not--” Phil rubbed his chin, the stubble scraping his fingers. “There are lots of things I’m bad at.”

“You balance your fucking checkbook, Phil. You can parallel park. I have personally watched you explain whist, a card game nobody’s played for a hundred years, to a junior agent just because they asked you. And I’m pretty sure it was on a dare.” Jasper leaned forward and put his hands on the desk. “Steve Rogers once said he was proud of you.”

“None of which counters my point,” Phil said softly. He wasn’t sure if Jasper was being willfully obtuse at him, or if he was just so artlessly straight that he’d never developed the capacity to judge attractiveness in other men. “You do realize that to be an effective honeypot, people have to want to sleep with the agent in question badly enough to expend effort in pursuit of them?”

“Yes, I know how a honeypot works,” Jasper snorted. “I do, in fact, read those memos that Hill sends out about what we’ll get fired over if we get caught falling for one more time. That’s why you’d be perfect for it. They’d never suspect a thing, because you’d sooner sign something in pencil than hit on someone on the clock. And Morse is psychologically incapable of backing down from a challenge, and the possibility of landing you where so many other agents had failed would be irresistible. She’d go down in some gonzo internal-ops hall of fame if she pulled it off.”

“I didn’t date outside the agency for two decades,” Phil protested. It hadn’t even technically qualified as dating, so much as a productive use of down-time around a seemingly never-ending wave of crises. Half the time he hadn’t even been able to find someone who wasn’t assigned to the same mission.

“But never, not a single time, did you date a subordinate,” Jasper said. “Because god forbid you break a rule.”

“That rule’s there for a reason,” Phil pointed out. “If you’re going to pick a rule to follow, that’s not a bad one to go with.”

“I’m not saying it isn’t, I’m just saying you’ve got a reputation,” Jasper told him. “Plus, you’ve got that Audrey Hepburn smile thing going on, so you know Barton would fold like a house of cards.”

Phil tried to sort through the nonsense Jasper had just spouted at him and gave up. He’d discovered sometime in his thirties that a good breakfast could no longer make up for an all-nighter, and he wasn’t sure he could have parsed it without a decoder ring on a good day anyway.

“Audrey Hepburn smile?” he echoed.

“That’s what Hill called it,” Jasper said, bobbing his head. “You know, that thing you do that’s technically a smile, but it’s still sad? Drives her up a wall?”

“Hill has strong opinions about how I smile, now.” Phil wondered if it was too late to throw Jasper out after all. They’d both finished eating. There wasn’t anything, even common courtesy, stopping him at this point.

“I think the opinions stretch back a ways,” Jasper told him slowly, considering it. “I mean, they seemed pretty entrenched. She specifically told me not to fall for it when she assigned me to the Avengers. She was all, he smiles like he’s still sad, and you just want him to not be sad, but it’s a trap, because what will make him not sad is authorizing the purchase of a criminal amount of titanium or expunging a juvenile delinquent’s ridiculously extensive criminal record so he can add her to the herd of stray cats we call an agency or giving back the liquor that you need a lot more than he does right now.”

Phil stared at him and tried to wrap his brain around the idea of Maria saying any of that. She’d denied all knowledge of his missing scotch, grilled him for half an hour over Skye’s record, and practically held a hearing about the titanium he’d tried to requisition for Jemma and Leo’s lab. The scorching glares she’d focused on him throughout Skye’s wifi-expansion presentation had been friendly, in comparison.

“She told me you’d figured out how to weaponize it right around the time you made level five, and that under no circumstances was I to make decisions based on trying to avoid it, which has saved me from having to do so much paperwork it’s unbelievable. I mean, just a ton of paperwork,” Jasper said. He stretched and cracked his back. “I figure it’s probably most effective on people like Hill and Barton. You know, where they’ve got a hard shell but it’s secretly covering a gooey center?”

“Oh, for god’s sake. Hill doesn’t have a--” Phil winced. “A gooey center.”

“She tries not to,” Jasper corrected, “but she totally does. And I feel for her over it, I do. It must be tough. I mean, that smile of yours kind of works on me, and I’m hard as a rock through and through, like a marble.”

Phil tilted his head. “You were five hours late to a rendezvous because you pulled over to help a turtle across the road.”

“I said I’m a marble, not a monster,” Jasper said tartly. “And technically, I was late to that rendezvous because I had to take our informant to the ER to get treatment for the resulting turtle-bite. Getting the turtle across the road took five minutes, it was nothing. I thought we were going to die of old age waiting for a doctor to stitch her up, though. I could have done it faster, even accounting for my penchant for fainting in the middle of surgical operations. It was criminal.” He made a face. “The point remains that if that femme-fatale smile of yours gets to her, I’m sure using it on Barton would be like shooting fish in a barrel. He’s practically nothing but gooey center, and I’ve personally seen him jump off a ten-story building just because you told him to.”

“Just because I--” Phil broke off and shook his head, momentarily at a loss for words. Clint had a kind heart, yes, but he was also very careful with it. “It was _on fire_! And collapsing out from under him. And Stark was standing by to catch him.”

“He still didn’t even hesitate. I’m telling you: fish in a barrel.”

“So your argument is that your terrible plan would be, under a set of circumstances that exist only in your own mind, not as entirely and completely terrible as it could have been?” Phil asked. 

If anything useful had come out of the conversation, it was the reminder that Clint and Bobbi trusted him--everyone he’d ever handled, managed, and recruited had trusted him--and that it was a thing that had to be earned on a rolling basis. He was immediately and intensely grateful for whatever happenstance had swept the note he’d drawn for Clint out of sight where it belonged. Whether he was going to be able to make Jasper talk to a counselor remained to be seen.

“You know, it’s been a long night, so I’m just going to take the acknowledgement that my plan isn’t as bad as you thought it was and run with it,” Jasper pouted.

Phil couldn’t help a rueful look at the absurdity of it all, at least until the sound of a shutter clicking alerted him to Jasper having slipped his phone back out.

“Audrey Hepburn smile!” Jasper said triumphantly.

Phil sighed. “That’s it. Out of my office.”

*****

Phil clasped his hands in front of him and did his best to appear unconcerned. Sharon shifted her weight from one foot to the other beside him, nervous but trying not to look it. The elevator slowed, ground to a halt, and opened, letting the happily oblivious analyst in front of them off at HR. Sharon held out until the car jerked back into motion.

“Did Deputy Director Hill happen to mention the purpose of this meeting?” she asked, her jaw working. She flushed slightly. “Sir.”

“She didn’t,” he said. She covered her disappointment with consciously straightened shoulders and a blank look. Phil silently cycled through the list of possibilities he’d assembled since receiving the summons ten minutes ago, and none of them involved Sharon even tangentially. 

Maybe he was missing something, he thought. He’d slept well the night before, but strange, half-remembered dreams had left him muddled and wrong-footed when he woke a full twenty minutes ahead of his alarm. Two cups of coffee and two hours later, he still didn’t feel as sharp as he should. 

Phil wished he’d been able to recall more of it at the time, and it nagged at him now. He’d been trying to repair a vase or a bottle of some sort, and every lapse of focus or attention saw it fall to pieces all over again, only every so often it had seemed to come alive in his hands and disintegrate deliberately. It hadn’t made sense, in the way that dreams usually refused the imposition of any sort of post facto logic, but it had still left him feeling guilty and inadequate. Phil blamed the bizarre six am conversation with Jasper of two days ago. It had left him more rattled than he’d been willing to admit and questioning both Jasper’s judgment and his own assessment of his working relationship with Maria.

Maybe he’d been missing more things than usual, lately. Maybe he was losing his edge. Phil rubbed his jaw and watched the floors tick by on the overhead panel. 

Or maybe he was just chasing his tail. Maybe Jasper had been saying anything he thought might land, and this peremptory summons had nothing to do with previously-known issues or incidents. Maybe it was some new assignment that Maria wasn’t bringing the rest of the team in for because of the ultimately minor but still quite dramatic problems they’d run into during the wifi upgrade. 

Phil brightened. Maybe Sharon had been approved as a reserve Avenger. It would be early for Maria to have made a decision; he’d only put in for it last week. But Sharon’s record spoke for itself, and he believed he’d made a persuasive argument in his recommendation letter. She worked well with everyone currently on the team, which made things infinitely easier with a part-time placement. There had been periods when Phil had been pinch-hitting for Jasper and the entire team had been reserve Avengers without the extra pay an official placement would have entitled them to. Sharon’s ability to mesh with the team wasn’t a matter of speculation but a known quantity, and her application was practically a formality. And, of course, the relative quiet of the past few weeks meant Maria was both in a relatively optimistic mood and clearing her paperwork at a good clip.

Sharon sneaked a glance at him, and he tried to be reassuring. “Sometimes it’s good news, Carter.”

She relaxed slightly, and Phil had himself half-convinced he was right by the time they reached Maria’s office. That conviction collapsed at the murderous expression on Maria’s face when she opened her door just far enough to check the waiting room, make sure they were alone, and haul them inside.

Phil pursed his lips at the sight of her office, and Sharon’s normal stone-faced unflappability was nowhere to be found.

“Welcome to the Rose Bowl, agents,” Maria snapped, spreading her arms. Phil wondered if he could get away with taking a picture. She was quite stunning with the red roses carpeting her office as a backdrop. There were at least two hundred of them covering the desk, the credenza, the chair, and a good portion of the filing cabinets and floor.

“Where did all of these come from?” Phil asked slowly, starting with the obvious.

“A florist,” Maria said flatly. Phil sighed, and she glared at him. “This is off-books, Coulson. Carter isn’t here, you’re not here, I want to see zero mention of this whatsoever in any logs, misreps, instagram feeds, diary entries, whatever. This didn’t happen. Are we clear?”

“Crystal, ma’am.” Phil straightened and waited for the other shoe to drop. He could almost feel the tension radiating off of Carter, and he tried to keep Maria’s eyes on him. “What’s the mission?”

“Your mission is to track down whoever these were supposed to go to and retrieve whatever superweapon, doomsday device, or classified technology Stark accidentally sent them instead of a half-ton of roses. These were delivered overnight, after the cleaning crew left. They cleared the front desk’s security inspection on all five points, and the delivery company and the florist of origin both check out, so we’ve probably already got another Helen Surprise situation on our hands.” Maria stalked around the outer perimeter of the flowers, glowering at them like they might crack and tell her everything she wanted to know. She turned and looked at Phil. “I don’t think I need to remind you how much trouble the misdelivery of a single bouquet has already caused. We could be printing entire human beings from scratch by now, but no. One box of flowers in the wrong hands, and we’re a month behind schedule.”

“Entire human beings?” Phil repeated. The Regeneration Cradle project had been focused on the remediation of major injuries and congenital conditions.

“Well, we wouldn’t,” she said after a short pause. “That would be unethical, according to the wet blankets down in legal. But we’d have the capacity to, if god’s gift to science could fill out a courier slip right.”

Phil surveyed the flowers. If Maria was correct, and she usually was, then whatever Tony had been trying to send her instead of the roses had been fairly large. It shouldn’t prove difficult to lay hands on, though he’d likely need to requisition a truck and a loading team to get it back to a secure facility.

“Have we tried just asking him, ma’am?” he ventured.

“I texted him a picture of my desk reimagined as a parade float, yes,” Maria said, giving him a smile he could’ve cut himself on. “He hasn’t seen fit to respond.”

“I see.” Phil nodded, then tilted his head at Sharon. “We’ll take care of it.”

“Oh, no,” Maria said, shaking her head. “ _Your_ mission is to find my missing Pym-particle detector or fleet of mosquito-drones or whatever it was before it falls into the wrong hands. Agent Carter’s mission, should she choose to accept it, is to remove every last petal of this mess to the director’s office without being detected, killing the internet, or involving anyone below a level four.”

“You want her to put your misdelivered flowers in Director Fury’s office,” Phil said, mentally mapping the route from Maria’s office to Nick’s. It was difficult to get an ipod past Teresa, never mind several crates of flowers.

“Without being detected, killing the internet, or recruiting from the rest of your merry band of troublemakers,” Maria repeated. She gave Sharon a long look, waiting for her answer.

“Yes, ma’am,” Sharon said. She seemed to be steeling herself, and Phil didn’t blame her.

“Dismissed, then.” Maria picked through a dozen roses and extracted her laptop, which was covered in pollen by the end of it. Her face curdled into deep distaste, and she snorted. “And don’t give me that look, Coulson. He knows what he did. If you need to contact me about any further developments, I’ll be in the presentation lab, working on a canned speech assuring Congress that the Avengers are a team of responsible, accountable people under close government oversight who are a net gain for world peace.”

“Of course, ma’am,” Phil said, trying to keep his tone neutral. Maria stalked out of the office as if the flowers had done some new thing to offend her in the handful of minutes since she’d admitted them. 

Sharon turned to him as soon as the door closed. “Is this going to get me court-martialed, sir?”

“If you don’t get caught, it’ll be between Fury and Hill. If you do, tell him she ordered it and I signed off on it,” Phil said, thinking quickly. Nick wasn’t allergic to roses, and unlike Maria, he didn’t have any particular aversion to them, either. This was most likely impromptu and penny-ante retaliation for the last time Nick had stuck Maria with giving testimony to the Intelligence Committee. Nick was more liable to be amused than angry. “Between the two of us, there won’t be much blame left over for you.”

Sharon cracked her knuckles. “Wish me luck, sir?”

“Godspeed, agent,” Phil said.


	4. Chapter 4

Sharon raised her glass, and Phil obliged her with a toast. She’d earned it and then some. He still wasn’t entirely sure how she’d bypassed security to the point that she’d been able to lay hands on Hank Pym’s shrink-ray for an hour and then return it with no one the wiser, but he certainly felt comfortable putting her in charge of closing those gaps.

“To a well-run mission,” she said, smiling. The bar wasn’t so noisy that he had to strain to hear her, but not so quiet that they had to worry much about their voices carrying.

“To a well-run mission,” he agreed. His own had been a cascading disaster, but Sharon had pulled hers off without a hitch.

“Thanks for distracting Teresa for me,” Sharon said, lifting her beer to her lips.

Phil shrugged and drank. Halfway through the exercise in futility that had been tracking down Tony’s non-existent misdelivery, he’d considered the possibility that his life would be less difficult if Jasper spent more time chaperoning the Avengers’ work lives and less time obsessing about their personal lives.

“I needed to speak to her anyway. Two birds with one stone,” he said. Teresa was a walking repository of the sort of information that never made it into personnel files; if she hadn’t known the answer to his question, he’d have been in dire straits indeed.

“Still, I appreciate it.” Sharon tilted her glass and watched the foam lace as the liquid settled back to level. “I just can’t believe Tony thought Hill would actually want a real hoverboard.”

“He didn’t,” Phil confessed. There was no harm in it, he was sure. She’d find out soon enough anyway, if not from Clint himself then from Bobbi or Natasha or Jess. “Barton sent the flowers. Stark generously agreed to part with an appropriately impressive piece of tech and take the fall.”

Sharon’s brows furrowed. “Why not just tell her?”

“Because this way SHIELD gets a real hoverboard.” Phil sipped his beer, satisfied, and she laughed and looked away. 

It was a better answer than the truth, that it had been easier to provide a fake solution that let Maria relax instead of an answer that would leave all that adrenaline and worst-case-scenario speculation with nowhere to go but at Clint. It had even been mostly Tony’s idea. 

After the gossip columns and tech blogs hadn’t produced any particularly appealing targets for an entire pallet of roses courtesy of Stark Industries, Phil had gone to the florist, tracked down the assistant who’d taken the order, and tried to verify the details on it. The assistant had demanded pictures he didn’t have and eventually settled for a detailed description of what, exactly, that many roses looked like all crammed into one office. Apparently orders of that size weren’t unusual, but they were intended for distribution in reasonable amounts throughout an entire company or building. 

Once the clerk had been satisfied, she’d recited the conversation she’d had with the customer who’d ordered the flowers, giving a pitch-perfect imitation of Clint’s diction and tone the entire time. According to her, she’d spent several minutes making sure she understood him correctly, another five trying to talk him out of it, and then another ten arguing about whether or not he could pay in cash for an order that expensive. It had all been unusual enough that she’d taken notes to prove due diligence to her supervisor for when it inevitably blew up.

“I didn’t think it would do it big enough to bring down the feds, though.”

Phil had thanked her for her time, and then, because it never hurt to be cautious, had asked Tony if he was somehow still responsible. After Tony had finished cackling uncontrollably, he’d practically insisted that Maria’s assumption not be corrected.

“I’ve suddenly become really, really, unaccountably attached to the idea of people losing their minds in horror and fear when they get a floral arrangement from me. I need a bunch of flowers with my name on the card to signal their personal apocalypse. Just let me have this, I’m begging you.”

And if Tony was willing to take the heat in exchange for the subjective glory, who was Phil to stop him? It helped that Tony didn’t answer to Maria in the same way that Clint did. Tony could walk out on the Avengers and be down nothing more than permission to operate in US airspace, which wasn’t nothing, but it wasn’t exactly something he’d felt the need to have before, and Maria knew it. Without SHIELD, Clint would likely be back to mercenary work, which, given the number of enemies he’d made during his time with SHIELD, wasn’t an option Phil cared to contemplate too frequently. 

Clint didn’t make mistakes often. He was, in Phil’s opinion, one of the best field agents they’d produced since Reagan had been in office. But he stuck to his guns when he thought something was bullshit, which didn’t always endear him to superiors, and he’d never managed to shake the bone-deep dread that he was seen as disposable, easily replaced, someone whose presence was suffered only so long as he could be properly useful. It was the sort of thing that had made men with easier lives and less riding on it pull up stakes and walk just to keep their dignity, turning their back on a good situation before it could turn its back on them.

“Thank you again for writing that recommendation letter,” Sharon said, breaking the silence. “It means a lot to me that you think I could be an Avenger.”

“You earned that letter, Carter,” he assured her. “There are very few career paths I don’t see you excelling in, if you opt to pursue them. Your aunt would be proud.”

“You think so?” she asked. She raised her glass quickly, but her eyes were on his face, weighing his response.

Phil laughed and considered what he knew of and had seen from Peggy Carter. “I’m sure Steve would be happy to tell you if you don’t believe me, but yes, I think she would be proud.”

“I keep surprising him with how different we are,” Sharon told him after a few seconds. “I think he expected more of a family resemblance, as it were.”

Phil swallowed another mouthful of beer, and he thought about how much things had changed since he was a young man. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell hadn’t even been on the horizon when he’d gone off to college, told himself it was just a phase and that he’d join up as soon as he stopped liking men better than women, knowing it was a lie even as he said it but not quite able to give up on his dreams just yet. If he’d been born only a decade later, he’d have been a Ranger instead of a SHIELD agent. Two decades later, and maybe he’d have been career military with a husband on the homefront and an application under consideration to adopt a kid like Skye before the system had a chance to chew her up and spit her out. 

Things changed because people changed them, though. Because people broke barriers and made sure they stayed broken. Peggy Carter had been a ruthless, brutally efficient woman in her time, but he’d always gotten the sense that she’d have preferred using her words to her fists. Maybe that legendary anger of hers wouldn’t have burned so hot if she hadn’t had to fight just to make people listen. Maybe she wouldn’t have been so quick to throw a punch if diplomacy had ever gotten her anywhere but the typing pool. Maybe she’d have been a lot more like Sharon, who could believe in SHIELD as it was instead of having to believe in what it could be, if only she could lie, cheat, and pummel that potential into a reality.

“Peggy was what she needed to be to do what she wanted to do in the world she grew up in,” he said finally. “Not having to kick down every door you get through gives you a different perspective, but it’s one she fought tooth and nail for you to have. So long as you keep kicking down doors and stopping the bad guys, I think you’re carrying on her work.”

Sharon gave him a genuine, if bittersweet, smile. She drained her glass and looked pointedly at his, almost empty in his hands. “One more round? A toast to the future?”

“Sure.”

When she returned, she raised her glass, her smile broader this time. “To kicking down doors.”

“To kicking down doors,” he echoed.

*****

Clint knocked on the door quietly, almost hoping Phil wouldn’t be in. Natasha hadn’t let him back off the idea of asking Phil for help once Clint had agreed it would be effective, not after he’d completely stalled out on winnowing the reduced list she and Bobbi had left him with. He’d spent the last four days dodging her by claiming that he was busy with the thing that thanking Hill for improving the wifi had mushroomed into, that he was sure he was _this_ close to an answer, and that Phil’s schedule was booked, all in rapid succession. The narrowness of Clint’s escapes had told him it couldn’t last, and it hadn’t.

He’d still had some hope of being able to figure it out without resorting to Phil, and if Clint had been able to narrow it down to a half-dozen names, he’d have just bitten the bullet and tried chatting them up one at a time. Anyone who’d spent at least fifteen minutes drawing him a gift certificate promising to go down on him was guaranteed to say yes to a beer with him at the corner pub, right? And if he got the wrong person, at least he’d have a date. With over twenty-five names still on the list, though, it seemed inadvisable at best and liable to land him in front of a conduct-review board at worst.

“Come in,” Phil called. Clint jumped, then squared his shoulders. He’d fronted his way through three floors of Serpent goons by pretending to be a pizza delivery guy. He could fudge the truth about why he wanted a list of visitors for five minutes.

“Hey, boss-man,” Clint said, grinning. Phil glanced up from his laptop and stopped, looking slightly alarmed. His eyes flicked to the hallway behind Clint and his posture tensed, a silent question.

He hadn’t gotten more than three syllables out, and Phil already thought there might be enemy agents infiltrating the base thanks to his bad acting. Great.

“Sorry, it’s been a long week,” Clint said, letting the fake smile drop. “I was hoping you could shed some light on something a little more, uh, personal.”

“Ah.” Phil settled and cocked his head, some of the tension draining back out of his posture. He still looked like he was on higher alert than he should be, and Clint mentally kicked himself. “Of course. Please, take a seat.”

“So, you know how I usually can’t remember a damn thing if medical hits me with anything stronger than an aspirin?” Clint asked, folding himself into a chair and picking at the sleeve of his shirt.

Phil nodded, his expression suddenly that much more of a blank, and Clint wondered precisely how embarrassing he’d gotten last time. It couldn’t be much worse than the time he’d apparently decided it would be hilarious to narrate “Folsom Prison Blues” at Steve in such a convincing deadpan that he’d gone to Phil afterwards with serious concerns. Maybe Clint had asked Bobbi to re-marry him. Maybe that’s why she thought the note was so damn funny.

“Well, I kind of have a bet going with Natasha that I’m getting better about it. You spent most of the night in my room after the robot thing, right?” Clint asked, skipping his way through the rehearsed story easily.

“That’s correct, yes.” Phil folded his hands in front of his face and waited, and Clint tried not to read too much into it. 

However oddly Phil thought Clint was behaving, it would have nothing on the truth. Unless someone had already leaked it, and this was Phil trying not to let on how appalled he was at everyone’s behavior. So far the most extreme reaction had been from Agent May, who’d called them a pack of degenerates without putting much venom into it but declined to offer her expert opinion on the note’s contents. Bobbi hadn’t been able to entice her by promising the art was surprisingly tasteful, given the contents of the script, and May had kicked them out before anyone had had an opening to ask about using Skye’s handwriting analysis software on it. Based on that alone, Clint couldn’t imagine how it would go over with Phil.

“Can you kind of make a list of everyone who visited, and any windows where you were out getting coffee or something?” he asked.

“A list of everyone who visited?” Phil repeated slowly.

“Yeah, like who dropped in to check on me, or swung by to say hi to you, or blazed through yelling about how they don’t need hospitals because they’re got a healing factor,” Clint said quickly, rattling off everything that came to mind which might serve as a distraction.

“Ah.” Phil still looked a bit bemused.

“I gave my list to Bobbi yesterday, so if yours more or less matches, and Nat can’t run down any strays from your coffee breaks, she’s going to take the fall for a, uh, florist malfunction involving the director a couple days ago.” Clint rubbed his palms on his knees and tried not to think of the last time he’d seen Phil look so carefully blank. “If I’m wrong, I fess up.”

“I see.”

“It took both of us working together to mess that up,” Clint offered quickly. “It’s not like it would be perjury or anything.”

“That would explain the grandeur of it, at least,” Phil murmured. He was well aware of how Natasha and Clint occasionally reinforced each other’s weaknesses along with amplifying each other’s strengths.

“You, um.” Clint coughed and blushed. “You know about it?”

“That’s one way to put it.”

“I didn’t quite understand why they were being so cagey when I placed the order, and Natasha was more focused on how big the arrangement was, because Bobbi said we had to get something good, given how much everybody chipped in for it. Well, not how much individually, but how much money we got from everybody? A lot of people kicked in, and I didn’t expect it to add up to so much so I didn’t think to keep a list, so we couldn’t go back and offer partial refunds,” Clint explained desperately. “And I swear I don’t know how they delivered it to Fury instead of Hill, because the girl who took the order read the delivery address back to me like five times, and she definitely said ‘Deputy Director Maria Hill’ every single one of them.”

Why couldn’t even _one_ of his bizarre fuck-ups happen when Phil wasn’t in the same zip code as him? A normal human being would have known better than to order so many roses for one person. Clint was occasionally responsible for the safety of entire nation-states, and he’d somehow botched a flower order. He could almost hear Phil judging him in the sudden silence of the office. He coughed and kept going. The hole could hardly get any deeper.

“I mean, I know we didn’t even have internet in the barracks when I started out, and anything’s better than nothing, but it’s like our wireless knows the worst possible time to crap out and then does it on purpose. So we wanted to express our, um, gratitude when that stopped happening.”

“Well,” Phil said evenly, “you certainly expressed it in an extremely memorable way.”

Clint’s blush deepened, and he tried not to think about the air of inevitability to Phil knowing he’d been partially responsible for the floral arrangement without even having to ask. Phil hadn’t betrayed so much as the smallest flicker of surprise. He turned to a new page on his legal pad, clicked his pen, and began writing. Clint deliberately refrained from leaning forward so he could read the list as Phil made it. The scratch of the ballpoint over the cheap paper was strangely portentous, too loud in the quiet room.

“Things are good between you and Morse, then?” Phil asked.

“Yeah, great,” Clint said warmly. That was solid ground, at least. “Better than they’ve ever been, if I’m being honest. I think spending all that time with Carol helped her get a better handle on what she wants, you know?”

They’d kept falling into each other’s beds, even though they both knew nothing had changed. Clint liked her enough that he didn’t mind the inevitable rocky break-up so long as it meant a month or two in the honeymoon phase, but it drove Bobbi nuts that his trajectory never seemed to alter. From her perspective, something about it read like a lack of self-confidence, or a lack of faith in his own abilities. Then she’d bowed out of an opportunity for a huge career advancement, and hadn’t that just struck a match and lit the fuse all over again? After the last blow-out, he hadn’t been sure they’d ever manage to go back to being proper friends instead of just colleagues with a history.

Phil’s smile seemed sincere, if a little sad. When was the last time Phil had given him a real one, all silver lining and no cloud? Clint couldn’t remember. It probably hadn’t seemed important at the time, hadn’t registered as something he might not see for another year.

“That’s great to hear, Barton.” Phil tore the list off and held it up, just out of reach. “You may want to lower the stakes with Romanov, though.”

“Playing favorites, sir?” It slipped out before Clint could shut his mouth, and the startled glance Phil shot him made him feel like he’d just blown the whole thing.

“Stark confessed to being responsible for the flowers on a whim,” Phil said after an awkward pause. “One of you scheduling a meeting to claim responsibility would be both unnecessary and inflammatory.”

“Oh. Um. Well, thank you. Sir. That’s good to know.” Clint conjured a smile that felt more like a rictus grin, grabbed the list when Phil set it on the desk, and got to his feet. 

Clint tried not to flee the office, his face on fire at the petty question--of course Phil had a protective streak when it came to Natasha, look what she’d come from--and dreading the inevitable request that he wait a second or clarify one last detail. There were more than enough Phil could pick from, between the flowers and the voucher and Tony butting in for no apparent reason. A single incidental question could unravel everything, and Phil had delivered more than enough of those coups de grace in Clint’s earshot that he didn’t dare risk it. He waited until he was in the elevator to check the sheet.

Phil’s name was at the top in neat, looping cursive, redundant but comforting. They weren’t even his responsibility any more, but he was still in their corner, and Clint felt itchy just thinking of pulling overnight in medical without Phil lurking somewhere close, making sure everything was secure and everyone was accounted for. One of the worst parts about the downtime following the Battle of New York had been knowing it was touch-and-go with Phil but not even being allowed to see him until the entirety of SHIELD’s psych unit was positive Clint wasn’t a sleeper agent. It had been like a nightmare he’d only half woken up from, and the memory still made a cold sweat start on the back of his neck.

Immediately below Phil’s name was Natasha’s, followed by Skye, Steve, Bruce, Tony, and, improbably, Hope and Jess. Two roughly five-minute breaks, one of which was helpfully noted as a phone call which Phil had taken outside the room but with a sightline on the door. One twenty-minute absence that had hopefully been spent on something more substantial than vending machine coffee and a donut. He’d left the ward at dawn, maybe half an hour ahead of Natasha circling back to start checking on people and two hours before Tony’d come swooping in with his accidental flowers.

Clint regretted bolting as quickly as he had. If he’d had the presence of mind to ask about Jess being there, he could have at least avoided the abrupt, unpleasant suspicion that he was being punked. He ran his fingertips over the perforated edges of the sheet. He’d been operating under the assumption that, with Bobbi and Nat accounted for, whoever had left the note had been sincerely interested. Which seemed a little premature now, didn’t it? Someone who wanted a quick hookup would probably have just left their number, maybe even written it on his hand so he couldn’t lose it. Someone taking the time to block out and draw a jokey certificate like they had, but then neglecting to sign it or add some means of contacting them? That had the flavor of a prank that Clint had proceeded to take far too seriously.

He ran his fingers through his hair and looked at the list as he waited for the elevator. Not Bruce or Tony, that much was a given. Natasha would have said something by now, if she’d done it as a passing whim. Skye wouldn’t have done it, but if she had, she’d have fired up photoshop and left something that could probably have passed for an actual treasury note, except that it would have been decorated with dongs and probably have had Phil’s face instead of a president’s. 

Hope was almost as thin-lipped as Bruce was about unprofessional behavior on the clock. Clint supposed it made sense given what had happened to her mother; she’d lived with the consequences of one bad day in the field all her life. He didn’t see her doing it in the first place, never mind letting it play out for so long when she saw him misinterpreting it.

Clint would rather chew his own arm off than talk to Steve about it, whatever Scott’s raunchy, half-assed history lessons might suggest about how the GIs had spent their spare time and their spare cash. Clint shifted position, angling himself away from any prying eyes monitoring the cctv, and pulled the voucher out to reappraise the artwork. Steve’s was more polished, more studied, even when he was just dashing off a quick sketch of something that had caught his eye on a recon mission. And, if Clint was looking at it clinically, he and Steve weren’t good enough friends for Steve to indicate interest like this. Sam might get--maybe even had gotten, given the easy intimacy they exhibited--a Tijuana bible of coupons for various sex acts, lovingly illustrated to whet his appetite, for his birthday or to celebrate getting a new set of wings. Clint and Steve simply weren’t close enough yet for Clint to see Steve overcoming his shyness about something so personal in such a blunt way.

Which left Jessica. 

Clint laughed bleakly.

Mystery solved, at least.

The only question now was whether it was an olive branch or another salvo, something with far less promise than his earlier assumption. Clint’s shoulders slumped as he read through the text another time. He couldn’t imagine Jess’s sharp, too-quick patter ironed flat and passive like this. She didn’t speak bureaucratese yet, hadn’t picked up the subtle verbal misdirects that could transform a fuck-up of epic proportions into an act of god for which no one was responsible. But there wasn’t anyone else it could have been, was there?

Twenty minutes in the middle of the night with no one else up and mobile on the ward wasn’t enough for a herd of alternate suspects to have stampeded through his room, and the timing excluded almost everyone left on his own list anyway. Clint sighed. Maybe she’d cribbed it from somewhere, or wheedled a quick report-writing lesson out of Sitwell first. Clint stuffed the paper back in his pocket. Only one way to find out.

Jess was in her room when he knocked, and the final nail was that she seemed to have been expecting him. Her dark eyes narrowed when she opened the door, but she stood aside and invited him in.

“Natasha said you might be dropping by,” she said sourly. “You finally find your balls?”

Clint wondered if Natasha had reviewed the security footage weeks ago, and insisted that he talk to Phil just to torture him into doing what she wanted. She hated it when her friends fought, especially when it was over something she considered stupid and easily solved.

“Something like that.” He held up the voucher and steeled himself. Might as well get it over with. “I, uh, found your note, too.”

“My note?” Jessica tilted her head, then plucked it from his hand and read it. She looked from the text to him and then back again. “Barton.”

“Yeah.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets to keep from chafing them nervously, then thought better of it in case she took a swing at him. There was a sudden, livewire tension running through her frame he didn’t like.

“After all this, you cannot _possibly_ think I’d offer to blow you,” she said, glaring at him.

He blinked at her, coloring.

“No! I mean, not seriously. Not like a sincere offer, obviously. But maybe as like a mean joke…” Clint trailed off, well aware that his face had to be scarlet by now. “Kind of like a 180 go-fuck-yourself with a kickflip at the end?”

“Even for you, that’s a pretty weird conclusion to draw,” she said, rereading the certificate. “Though I guess if you’ve got your head that far up your own ass, the perspective shift would be pretty radical.”

Clint let himself flinch at that. “Look, I’m sorry, okay? If I’d known you were going out with her, I’d have never ever ever, I swear on a stack of bibles, not once even thought about it. Cheating’s shitty enough just in the abstract, but screwing over a bro like that’s even worse. I had no clue she was the girl you were seeing. I didn’t mean to mess anything up for you. And I shouldn’t have said anything about you being in the closet. Even if you were, which I know you’re not, that wasn’t my place, and I’m sorry.”

Jessica’s posture softened a fraction. “I’m a bro, now?”

“We’re both Avengers, aren’t we?” he asked, shrugging. “That’s gotta count for something.”

“Yeah, maybe,” she allowed. She watched him for a long second, then seemed to come to some decision. “Fine, apology accepted. Do I even want to know why you thought my ultimate revenge would take the form of a--what even is this? A boner bond?”

“Well, at first I thought it was kind of legit--”

Jess snorted and shook her head in disbelief.

“Not like I could just show up, hand it over, and get my dick sucked,” he snapped, rubbing the back of his neck. This wasn’t exactly how he’d pictured the conversation going. “But, you know, like whoever left it thought I was hot and might want to go out for dinner and see where it led. I mean, I was pretty high at the time, maybe it was an ice-breaker.”

“You were high at the time,” Jess repeated, rubbing her eyes. “You know, I was wondering why the last three months have been remarkably headache-free, but now it all makes perfect sense, because I wasn’t talking to you on a regular basis.”

“It was under my pillow when I woke up in medical after that giant robot brawl in midtown,” Clint said. “Painkillers always knock me for a loop, so I don’t remember getting it. Or maybe I slept through getting it, I don’t know.” He spread his hands, suddenly frustrated. For all the relief of Jess seeming to forgive him, at least a little, she’d been his last lead, and it was a dead end. “You were the one person left who could have obviously done it, which is why I figured you had, only as an absolutely-not-sincere thing.”

“I guess that makes slightly more sense than you receiving some sort of divine revelation that I’d give you a joke-coupon for oral sex,” Jess said, somewhat mollified. “You hail-marying your way to that result is certainly more flattering than it being your first try.”

She read the note, significantly more slowly this time, and Clint swallowed. If Jess hadn’t been involved, it was probably best to keep it that way. He reached for the slip. “Here. I’m sure you’ve got something you’d rather be doing than getting involved in this, and, for what it’s worth, again, I’m really sorry about the thing with Chris. And I’m sorry it took so long for me to say it. I was mad about you thinking I’d deliberately pull a stunt like that, but I still should have sacked up sooner.”

“That’s very big of you.” Jess sidled away, keeping the paper out of reach, and gave him a sidelong look. “And to show you how much I appreciate it, and how one-hundred-percent I’m accepting your apology, I’m going to help you figure out who gave you this.”

“I’m suddenly remembering that this is way closer to how you usually do revenge,” Clint said, grimacing.

“ _Clint_ ,” she said, all fake disappointment and seriousness. “This isn’t revenge. This is me _helping_. Now, who else was on your suspect list?”

“Honest, Jess, I can’t ask you to put yourself out,” he said quickly. It was too late, and he knew it. She had that glint in her eye that meant somebody was in trouble.

“It’s no bother,” she assured him. “Hell, now you’ve got me intrigued. It’ll bother me if we don’t figure this out.” Her expression turned solemn and her eyes went wide. “It could even be a matter of SHIELD security. Somebody’s going around leaving bizarrely-detailed notes for agents while they drool into their pillows. It could even be the Zodiac killer. If we can’t figure it out on our own, we might even need to alert Hill to the situation.”

Clint winced, Phil’s warning still at the front of his mind, and considered the likely effects of digging in his heels even more. He gave up and handed over the list.

“Everybody else is already crossed off, then?” she asked, running her finger down the line of names.

“Tony knocked himself out of the running on accident, Bruce and Hope wouldn’t, Skye and Steve wouldn’t have done it like that, and Natasha’s been helping me investigate, so that’s either a long-con or a no-go,” Clint told her, keeping his posture loose and trying not to betray any hint of disappointment. “So there’s you and maybe some phantom ninja that literally nobody else on the entire floor noticed who snuck in while Coulson was mainlining half a pot of coffee and a protein bar.”

Jess glanced from the list to the slip and then back to the list.

“This is your list of possibles,” she said, like she was daring him to say yes.

“Yeah?”

“And you’ve marked off Tony, Bruce, Hope, Skye, Steve, Natasha, and now me,” she said slowly, with an exaggerated patience that was quickly reminding him why it had taken him so long to apologize for banging her girlfriend.

“Yeah.” Clint crossed his arms. Jess looked at him like he was the biggest idiot she’d ever met.

“You have got to be the biggest idiot I’ve ever met.” She sounded almost impressed, which he supposed was something. She handed the list and the certificate back and pushed her hair out of her face.

Clint slid both back into his pocket quickly, before it could occur to her to steal them again. “Enlighten me, then.”

“Pretty sure that’d be cheating,” she said, the smirk curling her lips almost edging into a sneer. “And I think we both know how I feel about that right now, don’t we?”

“Are you kidding me?” he asked. “It’s not--I don’t--this has been driving me nuts, Jess!”

“And I’m sure you’ll find a couple neurons still capable of firing sometime in the next few days,” Jess said. “At which point in time you’ll have the satisfaction of having come to the giant, obvious, flashing-neon-sign answer all by yourself.”

“You know, there aren’t actually terms and conditions on here,” Clint said, desperate. Maybe Jess was just messing with him, maybe she had no idea either, but she’d seemed genuinely disappointed by him not realizing whatever it was that had occurred to her. “Just a deadline. Which is two days from now. I have until the day after _tomorrow_ , Jess. After that, it’s just...”

Clint threw up his hands in frustration. He’d look like he couldn’t find his ass with both hands and a flashlight, probably. He’d look like he wasn’t interested in whoever’d given it to him, certainly. He might even already be too late on that score. If he’d given someone a redeem-a-date chit and they hadn’t cashed it in by the three-week mark, he’d certainly assume they’d only accepted it out of politeness in the first place.

“Fine.” Jess leaned back against the wall and gave him a magnanimous look. “If go-time rolls around and you’re still drawing a blank, I’ll think about looping you in.”

“You’re not even considering the possibility that you’re wrong here, are you?” Clint groused.

“No, because I’m not. It’s like one of those magic-eye pictures, there’s no missing it once you’ve seen the little sailboat,” Jess told him.

“Now you’re just saying that to make me feel bad.” He pouted at her. If it worked on Bobbi, he figured there was the slightest chance it might work on Jess.

“Of course I’m saying that to make you feel bad!” she giggled. “You should feel bad. Oh my god, you should feel bad. _I_ feel kind of bad, and I’m not even--” She broke off and shook her head. “Anyway, you’re burning daylight. Shoo. I’ll be listening for the two-hundred decibel ‘God damn it!’ that I expect will signal you having figured it out.”

“That volume would literally cause eardrum rupture,” he said. “Just so you know.”

“Sounds about right,” she agreed, nodding easily. “Now, seriously, out. I need an aspirin and to forget we had this conversation.”


	5. Chapter 5

“Hey, Tony, you got a minute?” Clint asked. The lab was an even bigger disaster than he remembered it being, and Clint wondered what Tony could possibly be working on that required the piñata dangling in the center of the room.

“No, I’m not done with your new bow yet, but I promise, it’ll be ready soon.” Tony’s voice was muffled behind the welding mask covering his face, and Clint didn’t need to see his eyes to know he didn’t mean a word of it.

“You said that three weeks ago,” Clint reminded him. “But that’s not what it’s about.”

“Sure.” Tony turned off his acetylene torch and plunked it down on the workbench, then flipped the mask up and stripped off his gloves. “Shoot.”

“Those damn flowers,” Clint said simply.

Tony threw back his head and started laughing, and Clint tried not to think about how much Tony sounded like a few of their regulars when he did that. Clint could practically hear him finishing with something stupid like “The world will finally know my true might!” or “Tremble before me, peasants!”.

“Yeah, those damn flowers,” Tony managed after a few minutes. He was out of breath by the time he finally tapered off, and Clint wondered just how much of a near-miss he’d had.

It wasn’t entirely _not_ Tony’s fault, but he was usually pretty quick to dodge responsibility on things he was one hundred percent culpable for. It was Tony who’d suggested flowers as an appropriate display of gratitude once personal-use wifi speeds had ticked up past ‘a snail’s pace’ and settled in at ‘pretty damn good.’ It was Tony who’d told them he knew thank-you gifts and who had ballparked an appropriate individual contribution at ten bucks for a suitably impressive arrangement. It hadn’t occurred to Clint until it was too late that the person he’d been asking for advice on how much to spend on something was the one guy he knew who could be counted on not to notice if his credit card statement had too many digits in it.

“Oh, cheer up, sourpatch,” Tony snorted, catching the look on his face. “Somehow Hill got wind of why Cho’s been ducking out of work early, and now unexpected roses are the fifth horseman of the apocalypse. I’m out some unmarketable junk, you owe me a few brewskies, all’s well that ends well.”

“Thanks, I guess,” Clint said. Hill was generally reasonable about harmless screw-ups, but the sheer volume of flowers crammed into the office in the picture she’d sent Tony had been alarming. Clint having misjudged something that badly was bound to prompt some very pointed observations about what they were trusting him with in the field, even if he could successfully argue that giving them to Fury and not Hill was on the florist.

“And you’ve got to admit, it was a pretty hilarious solution to the Riddle of Why Hill’s Texting Me Pictures of Your Flowers,” Tony said.

Clint grimaced, remembering the cold apprehension that had washed over him when Tony had gotten the text. He’d shown it around with his customary sardonic understatement, telling Clint that he guessed she’d gotten the message. Clint had realized, too late, that maybe barricading the deputy director out of her own office with a wall of roses hadn’t been the best way to thank her for the sudden appearance of reliable streaming speeds in the dorms and rec areas. Then word had gotten around that Fury wanted to know why his office was hip-deep in red roses, and it had turned into the stuff of nightmares.

“Also, it was you,” Tony continued, “so her dispatching Coulson to investigate something worked out in our favor for once.”

“You took the fall but still dimed me out to Coulson?” Clint asked plaintively. Maybe it hadn’t been so inevitable that Phil had known it was him, after all. Maybe if Tony had gone for broke, put his heart into it, and really sold it, Phil would have been duly shocked by Clint’s revelation. Tony’s phrasing finally caught his attention, and Clint shot him a quizzical look. “Wait, what do you mean it worked out in our favor?”

“No, I didn’t dime you out. He knew.” Tony stretched his shoulders and flexed his hands, then dug a bottle of gatorade out from under a pile of loosely coiled wire-clippings and pipe insulation. He took a long chug, sighed contentedly, and wiped his mouth on the back of his arm. “Pretty sure you left a paper trail a blind guy could’ve followed, just as an fyi. Maybe next time you order flowers for a superior, try to be a little more James Bond and a little less Spy vs. Spy. Cover your tracks, use a burner, don’t leave any witnesses, that sort of thing.”

“It was flowers!” Clint protested.

“Yeah, but it’s you,” Tony pointed out. “Bobbi wasn’t kidding when she said you could cause an international incident just by walking down the street.”

“Bobbi did not say that.”

“Okay, maybe it was more like you being able to get your entire team fragged and spawn-camped in a fishing simulator. Or a flight simulator. I may have been a little distracted by Steve and Sharon’s awkward-penguin courtship displays while she was complaining about your bad karma,” Tony said. “Anyway, Coulson only dropped by for one of his friendly little chats with me because he was stalling on giving a report to Hill, I’m pretty sure. Which just goes to prove my point. It was you instead of me or Scott or practically anyone else, so Coulson didn’t even blink at making with a good old-school cover-up.”

“That’s not--” Clint broke off and crossed his arms, irritated by Tony’s flippancy. “He’d go to bat for any of us.”

Tony looked around and wrinkled his nose, then began sweeping tools and materials back into the appropriate drawers. Clint wondered if JARVIS could be programmed to snap Tony out of his inventing binges, or if the AI had run the numbers and decided it was in humanity’s best interests not to frustrate Tony when he was in the middle of building weapons. Maybe Tony being happy or cranky was the only real difference between something turning out to be a new micro-solar panel or a new doomsday device.

“Yes, he would,” Tony agreed easily. “But there’s going to bat for somebody, and then there’s going to bat, bribing the umpire, and maybe kneecapping the shortstop for somebody.”

“He doesn’t treat me any differently than he treats anyone else on this team,” Clint said. He’d been written up and dressed down more than he cared to remember, the same as anybody else, before they’d all been handed off to Sitwell. He flushed when Tony started cackling again, almost as hard as he’d been laughing earlier at the whole situation.

“Oh my god, were you not joking?” Tony asked finally, wiping tears from his eyes. “You’re not joking. How are you not joking?”

“Because I don’t get preferential treatment.” Clint had worked damn hard to get where he was, and if he owed Phil over being given a break here and there, he’d paid it back every time he’d found an opportunity since then.

“Of course you do,” Tony said, smirking like Clint had told a joke. “Oh, don’t give me that look. It’s a demonstrable fact. Do you have any idea how much shit I’ve gotten away with by saying it was your idea?”

“You _what_?” Clint hissed, his eyes going wide. That was all he needed, Tony’s fuck-ups piled on top of his own in whatever mental tally Phil was keeping.

“Relax,” Tony chided. “It’s foolproof. He assumes you’ve got a good reason for the stuff you pull, or at least had a good chance of pulling it off, so he gives it a pass. I’m just sort of widening that umbrella a little so the rest of us can fit under it.” His brows furrowed. “You okay, there? You kind of look like you’re about to pass out.”

“Yeah, I might be,” Clint breathed, lowering himself into the only chair not stacked high with books and schematics. He felt dizzy and sick. “You just--you just tell Phil that stunts you don’t want to get chewed out over were my idea. This is a thing you do. Because that way he won’t yell at you about it.”

“When you say it in that tone, I get the feeling you’re maybe a little more upset about it than I thought you’d be,” Tony said slowly. “So maybe we should discuss it later, when you’re feeling a smidge better? And in my defense, we did kick this whole thing off by talking about something you did that I totally threw myself on the grenade over, because we’re bros.”

“Why me?” Clint muttered, putting his head in his hands. It wasn’t as bad as it sounded. It couldn’t be. Phil would have written him up or reamed him out if it was as bad as it sounded. “Why does this always happen to me?”

“Well, mostly because when we tried saying it was Natasha’s idea, he didn’t believe us,” Tony explained, finally having the decency to look concerned.

Clint’s blood ran cold, and his head snapped back up. “ _We_?”

“Um.” Tony cleared his throat and took a quick step back. “Sam may have caught on and started using it as a cover story for him and Steve’s, uh, less life-and-limb-friendly maneuvers. And I’m pretty sure Hope’s done it at least a few times. Unless that thing with the electromagnet and the thermite was actually you?”

Clint tried to swallow around what felt like a golf ball wedged in his throat. It was a miracle Phil was even still speaking to him outside a professional context if he was taking the hit for Captain America’s worst moves. And Clint hadn’t even been on the roster for the mission where Hope had blown up an AIM lab so badly it had fallen off its foundations.

“Are you guys trying to get me discharged?” he asked quietly.

“What?” Tony asked, his face going slack. “Of course not! Like I said, Coulson thinks it’s your idea, and suddenly it’s a novel approach and thinking outside the box and A-plus for effort and we get gentle conversations about what to keep an eye out for next time in which he uses his inside-voice. When it’s my idea, it’s just dumb and possibly suicidal and clearly audible from outside the building.”

“And when it’s Steve’s idea?” Clint demanded. Phil had been raised on Captain America as the ultimate role-model. If anyone was getting a pass, it was Steve, and Clint was a little ashamed of himself for not having tried to pin more of his own mistakes on Steve when he might have gotten away with it.

“Ha ha, oh man,” Tony said. “Were you not there when Coulson hauled him off the jet and tore him a new one about respecting your teammates’ limitations and abilities and not riding so far ahead on point that you’re completely useless to your entire crew?” He rubbed his hands together. “No, you weren’t! I think you and Bobbi were still trying to get Jess off that girder she got stuck on after the rest of the building buckled and the weather was too bad for her to just web-glider her way off it.”

Clint tried to picture Phil yelling at Steve and failed. “He did not tear Captain America a new one.”

“Well, he wasn’t yelling, but he was using his ‘I will ground you’ voice, and I think on the balance Steve would have preferred yelling. I didn’t know he was capable of feeling shame, before that. I figured his ego was as bulletproof as his shield, and that the serum had gotten rid of his capacity for introspection along with his asthma. Turns out that is not the case.”

“Literally anyone but you could have told you that,” Clint snorted. When Sam wasn’t there to take his cues from, it seemed like Steve spent half his time at parties and social gatherings carefully feeling out the situation and trying to map what he’d learned about current mores onto it in an attempt to fit in. He didn’t always know what he’d gotten wrong, but he usually had a pretty good idea of when he’d done it. Tony didn’t see it because Tony didn’t want to see it.

“Anyway, yes, you definitely get a lot longer leash than the rest of us mutts,” Tony said, neatly ignoring his point. “I figure it’s fair, though. You spend as much time as you do in the gym and on the range, you should get _some_ consideration for giving out free tickets to the gun-show.”

Clint could feel a blush starting on his cheeks and chest, and he wondered if it was too late to open a window and hurl himself right out of the conversation. The last thing he needed was Tony realizing that Clint had a chink in his armor the size of a dinner plate where Phil was concerned. 

Tony usually meant well enough, but he didn’t hold back when he felt cornered about something, and anything he’d picked up on could wind up as ammunition if the argument got bad enough. And in the meantime, Clint would likely never hear the end of it. He’d already let too much slip, with his reaction to Tony reassigning blame. Clint looked up to find Tony watching him with some surprise and kicked himself for not bailing earlier. Today was not going his way.

“Wow, really?” Tony asked, his eyebrows climbing.

“Look, can we just--” Clint began.

“No, look, I get it, kind of.” Tony grinned and held up his hands. “It’s the hot-dad vibe, isn’t it?”

“The what?” Clint cocked his head, confused. As clean-cut and sharply dressed as he always was, the last thing Phil looked like was a dad. “Jesus, Tony, where do you even pick this stuff up?”

“I do read the magazines I wind up in, you know,” Tony sniffed. His eyes were no less sharp when they swept back over Clint, more slowly this time. “For what it’s worth, I can’t imagine he’d throw you out of bed for eating crackers. I mean, he let me get away with leading a bunch of robot dinosaurs on a demolition derby through a city we aren’t declaring a rogue nation on a technicality, all because he thought it was your idea.”

Clint rubbed his face and tried to think of something besides strangling Tony with the cables of the earbuds draped across his shoulders.

“There a reason you never took your shot? You’re not usually trigger-shy.” Tony’s eyes narrowed. “Wait, it’s not because he’s a guy, is it? I can’t believe I just now realized I’ve only ever seen you getting politely but firmly shut down by ladies.”

“Do you _have_ to be more of a jerk here than absolutely necessary?” Clint grunted. If he hadn’t been grateful before that he’d had the presence of mind not to ask Tony about the voucher that first morning, he was now.

Tony coughed and scratched the back of his neck. “I wasn’t trying to be?”

“Could have fooled me,” Clint said. The idea of making a pass at Phil when he couldn’t get a first date out of someone realistically in his league was enough to make the blush crawling down his neck deepen. There was a reason he’d spent the best part of a month trying to track down someone who’d left him a joke-note about a blowjob.

“Seriously, though.” Tony raised his hands and tried to look sensible. Sam called it Tony’s board-meeting face, and Clint was slowly but surely developing an allergy to it. “If you don’t date guys, it’s not exactly my business, but I’m pretty sure you can make exceptions if you want. Nobody’s going to descend from the heavens and kick you out of the heteroflexible club just because you--”

“No, it’s not because he’s a guy,” Clint snapped, pulling himself upright. “It’s because, in case you haven’t noticed, he’s pretty much the only reason SHIELD never cut their losses with me. He’s practically my boss, who’s seen me in more humiliating situations on account of more dumbass plans than I can even remember at this point, who I almost got killed the last time I fucked up bad. So I’m thinking that yeah, he’d probably throw me out of bed for eating crackers.”

Tony scoffed. “You almost got _everyone_ killed the last time you fucked up bad. Nobody cares. It’ll be somebody else’s turn in the brain-blender next time. Probably Scott. He’s always picking things up and shaking them to see what they do, that has to bite him in the ass sooner or later.”

“Tony?”

“Yeah?”

“Stop helping.” The last thing he wanted was a reminder of how close they’d come to having someone in a Pym-suit running around trying to destroy the world, or how close he’d come to doing even more damage than he had.

“No, seriously,” Tony said, rolling his eyes. “You could use a win, I could use a win. Coulson could probably use a win, if the look on his face when he asked about the roses was any indication. Let’s order some breakfast and workshop this.”

“It’s five-thirty,” Clint pointed out.

“It’s never too late for breakfast,” Tony retorted. He cleared half a table by shoving the detritus onto the other half, then gestured at the empty surface like he’d performed a magic trick. “Food, plans, happiness. Romance, even!” He paused, his lips pursing. “Wait, five-thirty on what day?”

Clint stared at him, at a loss as to how Tony always found a way to be a bigger catastrophe when they were at loose ends than when they were run off their feet with emergency calls and disaster response.

“You understand that you’re making the worst possible case for this, right?” he asked, rubbing his wrist.

“Look, all I’m saying is that if Agent Hotstuff held it against you in any conceivable way, I’m pretty sure he could have sent Fury a two-sentence email and literally never had to set eyes on you again,” Tony said, boosting himself up to perch on the table he’d cleared. “Instead he’s covering for you when you accidentally send Maria goddamn Hill so many flowers it stops being just weird and starts being an active investigation. You’ve got to be at least in the running, you know? I’ve gotten pretty good at picking up on when people would really prefer to never, ever deal with me again--like that look you’re giving me right now is a good indicator, which is just rude because I’m doing you a favor--”

“This is you doing me a favor?” Clint asked.

“Yeah, this is me doing you a favor,” Tony grunted. 

He bit his lip and looked down, like he had to think about it for a second, and Clint dug the heels of his palms into his eyes. This was his life. This was someone the world trusted to keep it from getting blown up and overrun by monsters and taken over by aliens. 

“Or maybe it’s me seizing on the rare opportunity to point out when someone else is being oblivious about their personal life,” Tony admitted after a moment. “Whichever. I’ll ask my therapist about it later. But like I was saying, I’ve gotten pretty good at telling when people just want you to die in a fire, and it usually involves them hanging up every time you call and not answering your emails and making their assistants lie about them not being in their offices when you show up in person because they keep dodging your messages. It definitely does not look like them going out of their way to help you when they could just as easily stick a knife in your back. I mean, Jesus, Clint, he brought you an mp3 player full of audiobooks the last time you were stuck in the hospital for a week because, huge dork that you are, you asked him to read to you.”

Clint licked his lips and tried not to laugh, knowing it would come out too bitter by half. He didn’t clearly remember asking Phil to read to him, but he sure as hell remembered how miserable he’d been stuck in bed and in pain, with his eyes too swollen to read comfortably, and what a huge difference that five hundred hours of audio files--novels, pop science, and magazines, all of it stuff he was genuinely interested in--had made. He also remembered the screw-up that had landed him there, though. It had been a last-ditch dive right into a cartel nest to rescue a pair of scientist hostages who’d been moved at the last minute, and he’d hardly been the only one to land in the OR over it. They’d been damn lucky not to lose anyone.

“What part of that sounds like ‘date me’ instead of ‘I’m a walking tire-fire’?”

Of course Tony didn’t get it. It was Tony. He could at least shovel money at people to make up for the bullshit he occasionally put them through by being him, put on some big showy gesture or materially change someone’s life to give it teeth. Clint had never stopped being impressed with the way Tony could just casually name a museum wing after someone or fund their research program for the next decade to back up a ‘thank you’ or an ‘I’m sorry’ or the occasional ‘I recognize that I was a way bigger prick about this than the situation called for.’ What was Mediterranean-fusion take-out and tickets to a Yankees game compared to everything Phil had done for him that week? It was a token gesture, not parity.

“I’m not saying you’re a prize catch that anyone would count themselves lucky to land,” Tony said. “I mean, I’m not _not_ saying that, either, but my point was that he went out of his way to do something nobody would have noticed him not doing, because he thought it would make your life a little better. Which is usually a pretty good indicator that somebody likes you and, you know, honestly wants your life to be better.”

Clint looked away. He was hardly the only one Phil was kind to, or seemed to care about as something more than an asset, or had gone out on a limb for. And in all the time they’d spent together, not once had Phil’s hands lingered too long or his eyes wandered. Then again, he also kept things strictly professional between himself and the vast majority of agents, assets, and contacts with whom they didn’t work regularly. Clint had seen a side of Phil that he let very few other people get a glimpse of, and that wasn’t nothing.

“Your therapist tell you all that?” Clint asked. Maybe the use or desirability of counseling was something else to reassess, something he shouldn’t have dismissed so quickly when Bobbi brought it up. At the time, he’d felt like he’d had just about as much therapy as he could stand. She’d been quick, and a little sarcastic, about pointing out that she hadn’t meant another round with a slate of shrinks under orders to figure out if he still had an alien god pulling his strings.

“They don’t usually tell you that sort of thing so much as help you figure it out for yourself. I mean, mine told me because I like my conclusions verified independently by a panel of experts, but I think garden-variety stuff tends to get garden-variety epiphanies,” Tony said. He brightened suddenly, his smile ratcheting up until it was almost manic. “Coulson’s got the weekend off, right? I could get you reservations in that new restaurant that just opened across the street from the tower.”

“I cannot even begin to tell you how much that’s not happening,” Clint said flatly.

Tony gave him an exasperated look. “But--”

“I’m willing to consider the possibility that he might be personally fond of me,” Clint told him, shaking his head. He’d certainly never gotten along as well with any other handler. “But if you think I’m going to jeopardize that by asking him out on a date, you’re out of your fucking mind.”

Tony threw up his hands. “Fine. But don’t say I didn’t at least _try_ to make up for the bow being behind schedule.”

*****

“Hi, Coulson!” Jess sang. She plopped down in the chair opposite him and dragged it closer to his desk, smiling broadly.

“Drew.” Phil tried not to stare, but he could feel the hair standing up on the back of his neck. He thought this might be how flies caught in a web felt right before they died. “Do we have an appointment?”

“Nope! You have no appointments whatsoever for the next hour. I mean, you had one, but she suddenly remembered something she had to do somewhere else like, right now. So, I guess you should probably reschedule with, ah, Melanie, I think her name was?” Jess propped her elbows on the desk and smiled radiantly at him. “I feel like we don’t talk as much as we used to. We should fix that.”

“Are you feeling okay, Jessica?” Phil asked.

“I am feeling, well, not great, but pretty okay. Oh! I brought sandwiches. I meant to lead with that.” She opened her purse and dumped a pair of firmly-wrapped subs onto his desk, then kept shaking it until a half-dozen of assorted condiment packets followed. She picked a tube of chapstick and a set of keys out of the pile and shoved it back in the bag. “Roast beef or turkey?”

“Why does everyone think they can bribe me with food?” he muttered, surveying the pile between them.

“Because it works?” Jess asked brightly.

Phil sighed and raised his eyebrows.

“Because you’re a workaholic, and whenever you get really busy, your self-care goes right down the drain, and somehow you don’t notice but everyone else does, and it’s just easier to pick up some of the slack than it is to argue with you about needing to step back and delegate more and bump your own needs farther up the list of priorities?” She gave him a dazzling smile, and the identically chipper tone put a keener edge on her analysis. “So, roast beef or turkey?”

Phil grimaced, mentally revising the planned email reminding her about professional boundaries and respecting colleagues. “Turkey, please.”

“So.” Jess slid one of the subs at him, then claimed the other for herself. “You have a massive crush on our very own level-seven trainwreck, huh?”

“Um.” The packet of mustard in Phil’s fingers tore with unexpected ease and burst.

Jess held up her phone. A slightly blurred picture of the certificate he’d drawn for Clint took up the entire screen. From the angle, it almost looked like it had been taken with a buttonhole camera.

“That’s not.” Phil busied himself cleaning his hands and tried to think of an appropriate excuse for his behavior. It had been one thing to think Clint might remember, or might realize it was him. It was quite another for the entire team to find out. “I don’t have a crush on him.”

“Okay, so you’re in love with our very own level-seven trainwreck.” Jess flicked a replacement mustard at him, ripped the paper off her sub, and patted his arm sympathetically. “My condolences, by the way. I’d have brought ice cream and liquor if I’d thought it was that bad. Like, my game plan here was to talk you back to your senses over the lunch you just worked through for the third time this week, but that’s not going to work if you’re legit in love with that asshole.”

“It’s too early in the day for liquor, and Barton is not an asshole, Jess,” Phil said, falling into the same measured, didactic tone he’d found tended to get her attention quickest. “I’m aware that you two have been having some interpersonal difficulties lately, but on the balance, he’s not generally a careless or thoughtless actor. He’s certainly not malicious.” He paused, his stomach turning. “Did he ask you to come?”

“What?” Jess managed to scoff around a mouthful of food. She swallowed and tossed her head, her eyes rolling. “Ask me to come? He doesn’t even know who gave it to him! He’s moping about it like a kid who suddenly realized their valentine is addressed to Occupant.” She wrinkled her nose. “That’s a thing, right? Did I just completely mess that up?”

“Close enough. We can go over it later.” Phil shrugged around the sinking feeling spreading through his chest. He needed to talk to Clint as soon as possible and explain everything, and Clint wasn’t going to be happy when Phil told him what he’d done. Phil only hoped it hadn’t gotten too out of hand already, that a sincere apology could still smooth things over. They’d gotten through rougher patches, certainly, but those had at least been due to circumstances beyond their control. This had been deliberate, even if the consequences hadn’t been intended.

“Okay. Anyway, he’s spent the last however many weeks looking at this thing, which is in your stupid little doodle style, done with your favorite type of pen, on paper from your notebook, with Captain America’s original tin showgirl shield on it, and he has no idea who he got it from.” She tore another bite off her sandwich. “All that, and he has no idea it’s from you. I mean.” She threw up her free hand and shook her head savagely. “Did you have to fall in love with such a dumbass?”

Phil’s lips thinned. Animal attraction combined with genuine affection and respect for the man he’d come to know so well over the years were a solid combination, but he wasn’t young and stupid enough to call it something it wasn’t.

“I’m not in love with him, either,” Phil told her, picking at his sub. That he still had an appetite at all after this made him realize how hungry he’d been, in spite of the granola bar he’d eaten an hour ago. His eyes went to the clock, and he checked himself. Two hours ago.

“You laugh at his jokes even when they’re not funny.” Her eyes narrowed dangerously. “That sketch started out as one of his stupid jokes, didn’t it?”

“Not exactly, and his jokes aren’t stupid, they’re just lowbrow,” Phil said defensively. He wondered at what point his career had become reducible to herding a series of feral children with superpowers into some semblance of adulthood. “And I feel like we should revisit that talk we had about compiling personal-use dossiers on colleagues.”

“I’m not compiling a dossier, I’m just observant,” Jess retorted, her expression turning triumphantly smug. “Observable data: You’re like fifteen percent more cheerful when he’s around, and you let Sitwell dump Avengers work on you if it means spending time with him. Conclusion: You’re either in not-love with him, or he’s got secret archer pheromone powers. Also observable data: He has no idea whatsoever that you’re into him.”

“And it would be better for everyone if that remained the case, don’t you think?” Phil asked. 

Whatever torch he was carrying for Clint had to burn itself out at some point, and in the meantime it was livable, provided he could avoid the attendant humiliation of Clint knowing about it. He’d spent a lot of time over the years deliberately not seeing Clint’s ass or Clint’s abs or Clint’s crooked, infectious grin; he didn’t think he had it in him to deliberately not see Clint’s pity or Clint’s betrayed confusion.

Jess sucked at her teeth, watching him like he’d grown a second head.

“Is this like that game people play where they pretend the floor is lava, even though it obviously isn’t?” she asked finally. “I mean, is there some bizarre collective cultural derangement that I’m supposed to have already bought into here that would lead to me agreeing that it’s definitely better for you to not be however happy being with Barton could possibly make you?”

“That would all be predicated on Clint being attracted to me, Jess,” Phil pointed out, suddenly tired. The week’s long hours were starting to catch up to him, and the extended weekend he’d been looking forward to seemed less and less likely the closer he got to it. He started eating again solely for an excuse not to engage in the inevitable justification of his assumption, a long and growing catalog of the ways in which Clint was out of his league and had never, prior to the night Phil had drawn the voucher that had started this mess, expressed more than a perfectly reasonable amount of collegial interest in him.

“I’m having a hard time thinking of too many other reasons he’d have a flash drive full of shirtless pictures of you,” Jess said, finishing her sandwich.

Phil stared at her, his mouth suddenly dry.

“Still not compiling a dossier!” She wiped her face with a spare napkin. “That was just perfectly normal boredom-stalking.”

“Which is also not appropriate behavior, Jess,” he managed.

“We’re more friends now than coworkers, though,” she protested. “He even said we’re bros.”

“It’s not appropriate behavior, full stop,” Phil explained.

“Still, though. There’s not much other reason he’d be keeping pictures of you at the beach or some swanky hotel pool or whatever on a password-protected USB disguised as an eraser, right?” Jess’s eyes widened. Phil massaged his forehead. “Wait, does that count as inappropriate behavior? It’s not wrong to blow the whistle on someone behaving inappropriately! There was a seminar on it and everything. Sitwell kept glaring at specific people every time a new thing you weren’t supposed to do was brought up.”

“I think something else is about to make the list,” Phil said drily. He checked the impulse to touch the scar on his chest, the thought of Clint collecting pictures of him undercut by the fact that he didn’t look like that anymore. Clint was obviously cognizant of the fact that their professional relationship no longer precluded a liaison. If he’d wanted to say something while he was sober, he’d have done it already. “And I’m reinstating our weekly meetings as of now.”

“Why?” she demanded. “I’m an Avenger now. Sitwell’s problem, remember? And you toss people’s rooms and have Skye crack people’s stuff all the time.”

“Because it’s part of my job. Trust me, I don’t go home and break into my neighbors’ apartments and paw through their dressers in my free time.” Phil closed his eyes for a moment as the full impact of what she’d said landed. “You had Skye bypass the security on Barton’s drive?”

“Don’t worry, it only took her like two seconds,” Jess said, waving a hand. “And you’ve definitely got her blessing. She thought it was adorable.”

“The latter is more concerning than the former.” Phil could only imagine what Skye would do--might have already done--with the information. He’d have to speak with her as well, and that was a conversation he wasn’t looking forward to.

“So, you’re going to tell him, right?”

Phil’s throat constricted at the thought of having any sort of real shot with Clint. It was such a tempting idea. Clint smiling, accepting a dinner invitation. Clint being genuinely relieved that he didn’t have to make the first move instead of scrambling to cover his embarrassment at a pleasant diversion turning into an unwanted reality. Clint being interested enough to risk the fallout of everything fizzling after a few dates. Clint not feeling betrayed at the idea that Phil was the one behind the note he’d been investigating. Clint not having just told him that things were going well with Bobbi, a woman with whom he might have a real future.

“Jess, it was a mistake to have drawn up that voucher,” Phil said, shaking his head. “It was an even bigger mistake to let it out of my hands. I’m definitely not going to make it worse just because it turns out to have been less of a joke on Clint’s part than I assumed it was at the time. He deserves an apology for any embarrassment or hurt this has caused, not further complications.”

“Oh my god,” Jess groaned, putting her face in her hands. “You’re just as dumb as he is. It’s going to be the worst when you two finally get together.”

*****

Melinda slowly collapsed onto Phil’s couch, let her head fall back, and closed her eyes. “Have you given even the smallest amount of thought to what happens if we find Squirrel Girl?”

Phil cringed slightly. Skye wouldn’t budge on the name, and everyone else had picked it up without seeming to notice how likely it was to stick in official documentation. He wasn’t looking forward to Maria’s reaction to it. The phrase ‘trustworthy, responsible, tax-payer-funded agency’ would probably figure prominently.

“We do what we always do,” he said wearily, skimming through a stack of incident reports. Most of them documented unusual behavior in the local squirrel population that didn’t appear to be even tangentially related to a new superhero, and he’d been gradually reducing the pile since Jess had left. “Give her the pitch, get her on board, and start training her.”

“Your plan is to put a teenager and her gang of telepathically-controlled, flying rodents on the Bus and let Skye make her worse.” Melinda ran one hand along the back of the couch until she found what she was looking for, pulled a cushion out, and fished the bottle of scotch Phil had hidden there from its secret compartment.

“How?” Phil asked, resigned. He’d spent decades successfully eluding and confounding KGB operatives, corporate spies, and MI6ers on competing projects. Yes, it was Melinda, and she knew him like the back of her hand, but it still should have taken her more than five seconds.

“Phil,” she said, giving him a knowing look. “It’s where Director Carter kept hers.”

He flushed and pulled out a pair of glasses. He hadn’t even been thinking about that when he’d picked the spot.

“On board, not aboard,” he said as Melinda poured for both of them. “Someone less airborne and less us can handle transport, if she agrees. And I was actually thinking it might be you making her better?”

Melinda doubled the amount of liquor in her glass without comment, and Phil sighed.

“You’ve done so well with Skye,” he said. She’d done well with all of them, really, but Skye had needed so much more than the others. If it hadn’t been for Melinda’s mentoring, training, and example, Phil doubted Skye would have dodged a prison sentence, never mind still be working with the team and on her way to full agent status.

“Which I’d expect to result in a commendation, not--” Melinda’s expression soured out of all keeping with the severity of the situation. “-- _squirrel_ patrol.”

She took a generous gulp of scotch and settled back onto the couch, glaring at him.

“Since when do you hate squirrels?” Phil asked, amused and trying not to show it. Jasper hated them, or at least had enough ill-will that having to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting one could launch a fifteen-minute tirade about ‘furry-tailed rats,’ but he couldn’t remember Melinda ever having voiced an opinion, and the idea of her having long-standing issues with them was absurd enough to feel like a joke.

“Since roughly two hours into the day-long squirrel-documentary marathon currently happening on the Bus,” she said. “Serious research shouldn’t involve that much popcorn or that many youtube clips, Phil.”

“Your country thanks you for your service,” he snorted, and she threw a cushion at his head. He ducked easily, and she finally cracked a smile.

“This cannot possibly be serious enough to warrant the time they’re wasting on it,” Melinda pointed out, shaking her head.

“From witness reports, it sounds like this girl is already effective in the field,” Phil said, shrugging. “She’s creative, resourceful, and clever. She’d be an asset if we could bring her in, and she could prove dangerous if left to her own devices. Given what she’s been up to that we know of, I doubt she’ll have many reservations about joining up in some capacity. And the location’s convenient.” 

“The memos about forming a second Avengers team on the western seaboard have finally hit critical mass?” she asked, reaching for the bottle again.

“Stop that,” Phil said mildly, moving it out of her reach. “And I think so, yes. It makes a certain amount of sense, in terms of response times and geographical distribution. And it would take some of the pressure off the current team, once things pick back up.”

Melinda snatched the scotch out of his hands. “Always a ray of sunshine.”

“You know how it goes.” Phil sat back and spread his arms. When it rained, it poured. Once one problem made the news, everybody else had to get in on the act, too.

She grunted and raised her glass. “Why do supervillains all have to be such a pack of joiners?”

“Joiners?” Phil asked. Skye’s vocabulary was rubbing off on the rest of the team at an accelerated pace, it seemed.

“It’s an easily-understood word which perfectly describes the behavior under discussion,” Melinda said, her eyes daring him to make an issue of it.

“I’m sure the psych division has an incredibly disturbing answer for that,” he said, raising his glass to his lips. “Probably something to do with their collective need for social acceptance and acclaim colliding with their superiority complexes and anger-management issues.”

“Speaking of the psych division.” Melinda swirled the remaining scotch and watched him, and Phil tried not to quail, suddenly and irrationally panicking at the thought that Jess had spoken to her about the voucher he’d given Clint. He was ready to plead temporary insanity at this point. “There are easier ways to get put back in charge of the Avengers than landing Sitwell in the ICU with squash-related head-trauma.”

Phil blinked at her, at a loss. “What?”

“You set him up with Sareva as a squash partner.”

“Yes?” Phil still wasn’t sure what she was driving at. 

Teresa’s list of personnel who were competent players had only yielded one name with a compatible skill level and schedule that would let Jasper get back on the court and stop obsessing about Clint and Bobbi’s relationship. It had taken a little string-pulling to get them both at the gym at the same time and seed the environment with enough prompts that the conversation they struck up about it seemed to have been their idea, but it had been worth it. Jasper was happier than Phil had seen him in months, and he hadn’t dropped by Phil’s office with food and a litany of paranoid theories about what new threat was going to fall out of the sky or erupt out of the sewers since his first match with Ayna.

“Sareva’s been banned from nine different squash leagues for roughhousing, Phil,” she said. “Which is, incidentally, eight more leagues than I’d have previously assumed this state even had.”

“Sitwell can handle it,” Phil protested. “He’s a grown man. He wrangles superheroes for a living.” Melinda raised her eyebrows. “He only took up squash because medical made him stop playing jai alai. There’s a reason he hadn’t found a new partner since Kennedy moved to the Hub. They’re a perfect match.”

She drained her glass. “Okay, let me rephrase: There are easier ways to get put back in charge of the Avengers than landing Sitwell in the ICU with murderball-related head-trauma.”

Phil shot her an irritable glance before looking back at the reports in front of him. At least Jasper was a safer subject than a new superhero who could control squirrels but occasionally did things like accidentally rescue opossums stuck in trees instead of cats. Five rounds of rabies vaccinations later, someone had apparently--finally--remembered opossums didn’t carry rabies.

“I was doing a friend a personal favor, not engaging in some byzantine and highly-inefficient plot to sabotage him professionally,” Phil grumbled. “And it worked! He’s smiling at people instead of making that half-grimace he always uses when he’s trying to fake it. He’s relaxed around the office. He changed his phone’s lock screen back to a turtle instead of Giulietta Nefaria’s mugshot. He doesn’t have that obvious fight-or-flight response when someone asks for his thoughts in meetings. He isn’t double-parking in the garage just for kicks.”

Phil wasn’t even entirely sure it still counted as double-parking when creative use of angles resulted in an entire level being unable to maneuver around one car in order to exit.

“Using Sitwell’s adrenaline-dependence and his penchant for risk-taking to manipulate him is still beneath you,” she said, a smirk lifting one corner of her mouth. Phil scoffed and sat back in his chair. “You should challenge him to a fist-fight like a responsible adult.”

“Oh, for--” Phil sputtered. “That was _one time_. And I wasn’t so much challenging Corbin to a fist-fight as trying to get him to realize that starting a fist-fight wouldn’t solve the problem and he didn’t want to do it.”

“By challenging him to a fist-fight,” Melinda pointed out.

“Yes,” Phil said, fighting the urge to duck his head and look away. It had seemed like such a clever move at the time, when they’d all been too green and too drunk to realize what idiots they were being, or that in twenty years they’d all still be working together. “Admittedly, it was not my finest hour.”

He looked up to catch her watching him thoughtfully. He could see the shadows of her younger self more clearly in that moment, and the sudden memory of what they’d been when they’d first started out, of who she’d been before bad decisions and worse extraction plans had made her reevaluate her ability to be a field agent without losing too much of herself in the process, settled on him like a weight.

“It’s okay to miss it, you know,” Melinda said quietly. She poured them both another round. “I miss my desk.”

“I don’t really miss it. I just wish I hadn’t left it the way I did. If anything, I miss who I was before I got a reminder that there are things out there we can’t train for.” That no matter how good they were, there were times it wasn’t going to be enough. Phil smiled sadly. “And I’m sorry about pulling you back into this.”

“You’re not that sorry.” She fixed him with a look, and he colored.

“I am when the shooting starts,” he told her, looking at his hands to avoid her eyes. “I am when there’s a good chance someone might not make it back onto the plane.”

When fear for her team could kick-start that cold, bleak rage she’d worked so long and hard to put behind her, when she might be left putting herself together all over again because of a call he’d made and then kept making. When it was too late. Phil rubbed his eyes. If she hadn’t been such a damned good field agent, it would have been easier to be a good friend.

Melinda drank her scotch and looked away. “At least you put together a team worth worrying about.”

“I wouldn’t have pulled you back for anything less. That much, I can promise you.”

They drank in silence for a few moments, then Phil frowned. Jasper and Melinda weren’t friends and didn’t get along well, and he hadn’t thought she was friends with Sareva. “How did you even hear about the squash thing? They haven’t already tried to kill each other, have they?”

“Teresa stopped by to ask about it. According to Morse, they’ve been putting in something like an hour a day on the courts.”

“Teresa?” Phil wondered if she’d been checking on his story out of curiosity, or in an attempt to run down the team who’d sneaked the roses into Fury’s office. Probably the latter. “Interesting.”

“Is Fury not going to be as easy to persuade that you’re not plotting something?” Melinda asked, chuckling.

Phil toyed with his glass. If he started talking, it would be one long unraveling skein from the flowers back to the voucher. Maria could ignore inconsistencies or fuzzy motivations when it suited her to have plausible deniability on some aspect or other of why her agents did what they did. Melinda’s effectiveness was too closely tied to him having his act together to let anything go.

“She’s the one who told me Sareva played squash. I just didn’t think she was that invested in the outcome.”

“Or that she’d think to trace that truckload of flowers back to you?” she asked, lifting the tumbler in a mock-toast.

“I have no knowledge or recollection of any truckload of flowers,” Phil said, trying to keep the flush off his cheeks.

“Was it as impressive as Morse said it was?” Melinda asked. “She showed me pictures and then said it didn’t do the situation justice.”

“It was unbelievable,” he told her, accepting defeat. If she’d been talking to Bobbi, there was no point in pretending it had been anything but a circus from start to finish. “I don’t know what Barton was thinking.”

“Barton?” Melinda repeated, her lips curling up. “Morse said it was ‘persons unknown.’ I assumed she meant Stark, for obvious reasons. Why did Barton think it was a good idea to blanket the director’s office with…?” She stopped for a moment, realization dawning. “No.”

“Yes,” Phil said, draining his glass.

“And then you…?”

“Under orders, yes.”

“Because Fury’s office was closer than a garbage chute?” she asked. Phil took it as a good sign that she looked almost impressed.

“Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do and die,” he said. “Though if it were, I’d suspect it has something to do with the proposed budget for the Pacific Avengers. She’s going to be defending that one for ten days straight once the committee sees the number of zeroes in it.”

Melinda shook her head slowly, tried not to laugh, and failed. It was a few moments before she recovered enough to pour them another round. “There’s literally only one type of flower she doesn’t like.”

“Yes,” he agreed.

“How did he not know that?” Melinda asked. “ _Stern_ knows that. You remember the last time he sent a bouquet for her birthday?”

It had been three dozen pink roses, and Maria had requisitioned a liter of liquid nitrogen and a pair of safety goggles from the lab and spent the rest of the afternoon working out some residual frustration about the senator’s interference with the regulatory commission’s reauthorization of their charter. It might have been written off as a coincidence if Stern hadn’t made a point of asking if she’d gotten it and whether it had been to her liking, all with his trademark shark-smile, the next time he’d seen her.

Phil rubbed the back of his neck and let one corner of his mouth twitch up. “Even Hawkeye occasionally misses things.”

“Well, at least now I know how you got mixed up in it,” she said. “Barton.”

“Am I honestly that transparent?” he asked. He hadn’t meant to be. He’d never meant to be, not with so much riding on him at least being able to pass for a responsible adult who could be trusted to make the right call under pressure. He liked to think he’d come a long way from the floundering novice who’d put up a big fight to get Melinda an official extraction when she’d wound up in the bay on their first run together instead of saying ‘yes, sir’ and then quietly ducking out and taking care of it himself, immediately, like he should have done. He liked to think he didn’t make obvious mistakes so many times in a row, when he should know better.

Melinda seeing it was one thing, but for Jess to have picked up on it so quickly into the bargain wasn’t promising. And he wasn’t looking forward to the conversation with Skye about what Clint may or may not have been doing with a bunch of operation surveillance photos, if Jess’s assessment was accurate. He’d only been able to let it slide until tomorrow because she was so wrapped up with the new superhero project that she hadn’t had time for anything else, including coming to erroneous conclusions about Phil or Clint’s romantic life.

“I don’t know that enough people have noticed for it to present a problem, unless you count the director using it to get you to volunteer for extra PR-duty a problem,” Melinda told him. “Which you should but probably don’t, because you can clear twice as much red tape in one week as most people can in a year. Or have you done something besides sneaking a parade float’s worth of flowers into Fury’s office, framing Stark for sending them to Hill, and arranging to have your successor killed in a deniable athletic accident?”

Phil put his face in his hands. “I may have screwed the pooch in an even bigger way, yes.”

“Those were fairly substantial ways of screwing the pooch,” she said, leaning back against the couch and studying him.

“I’m aware of that,” he said.

“Is anyone dead?” she asked.

“No.”

“Maimed?”

“No.”

“Facing treason charges?”

“No.”

Melinda shrugged and finished her drink. “Then you’ve done worse.”

Phil sat back and choked out a laugh, feeling like he’d been punched. “Guess I had that one coming.”

“A little.” She smiled slightly. “Mostly you just needed a dose of perspective, I think.”

“Thank you.”

“Thank me by giving the next investigation involving someone with animal- or fire-based superpowers a pass.”

“I solemnly swear that, if humanly possible, I will pass on the next investigation into reports of someone with animal- or fire-based superpowers,” he repeated, raising his right hand.

“This seems like as good a time as any to tell you that Simmons was talking robot squirrels when I left,” Melinda held up the bottle, “so I’ll be keeping this.”

“By all means.” Phil spread his hands. It wasn’t like she hadn’t earned it.


	6. Chapter 6

Clint stared grimly at his phone. It was far, far too early for this.

Skye’s helpful subject line--“Is this the butterfly or the breast stroke?”--had told him everything he needed to know about the video’s contents, and he’d played it anyway. There came a point, he thought, at which he had no one to be angry with but himself.

An image of Phil’s trim form cutting through the water like a knife was frozen on the screen, his technique as flawless as he was gorgeous. Clint tried to muster some actual guilt about watching it. Everyone knew the base’s common areas were wired for sound, that there were security cameras on the pool, the gym, the picnic areas, the stairwells. The list was endless. The devices themselves were frequently concealed, but their presence was an accepted fact: if the area could be observed by another agent without trespassing, it was being observed by a camera. The only places there was a reasonable expectation of privacy were in the barracks and the bathrooms. 

But the corollary to that was that there was also a reasonable expectation that the people watching the monitors and reviewing the footage weren’t being goddamn pervs about it. Archiving snippets for personal use was gross, and he wasn’t sure if being the recipient of material swapped around like contraband instead of doing it himself made it better or worse, morally speaking.

He was going to have to sit down with Skye and talk to her, that much was clear. He’d been able to ignore the issue when it was candids she’d clearly taken herself, but nabbing security footage off the servers was another thing entirely. That had to stop, and in no uncertain terms. 

Clint still couldn’t bring himself to regret lingering over every last personal photo she was tormenting him with before he deleted them, though. He wasn’t ever going to be able to touch--not with intent, anyway--but there couldn’t be any real harm in looking, could there? Especially when they were entirely more modest than the collection of op-shots he’d compiled over the years. He scrolled back through a few photos to find the only one he hadn’t been able to make himself erase. It was of Phil in his flashiest suit, no tie in sight and a broad, genuine smile on his face.

It was somehow sexier than the ones from Ibiza, where Phil had been lounging around in a speedo for two days listening to some idiot arms dealer two deck-chairs down broker poorly-coded sales on his cell, or the ones from Cannes, where Phil and a pick-up team had traded off tailing a cartel operative who favored using venture capital to launder drug money on her various red-carpet excursions. There was a performative nature to being the subject of surveillance photos from active investigations, and it made them closer to baseball cards than leaked nudes. Clint hadn’t had many qualms about taking advantage of it. 

An agent playing dress-up and disappearing into a cover identity was selling an act. Observation was by necessity up close and personal, and the agent behind the telephoto lens was frequently the agent feeding information into the earpiece as well. _Two more guards on the door, likely armed. Exits still clear. If you give me a sneer and a quarter turn, I could get you a spread in Vogue. Bartender’s got eyes on you, strike up a conversation with someone._ There couldn’t be any hiding it when everyone had the same access to the same files. Hell, it could even be a point of pride for copies of the photographic evidence to disappear into colleagues’ personal files for future reference, proof positive of their act’s effectiveness. 

The soundless motion of Phil’s arms flashing through the water came unbidden to mind, and Clint chewed the inside of his cheek. A surreptitious print from a security still no one was supposed to be ogling was a very different thing.

Clint closed everything out and shoved his phone back in his pocket. He’d talk to Skye before lights-out. There was only so long she could keep doing that before some other cowboy nerd busted her, and then it would be about ten seconds before they linked her to Clint. A one-off probably wouldn’t get flagged, but he doubted she’d have done it at all if she thought there was a problem with it. She wouldn’t stop with that any more than she’d stopped sending him her own stuff. And then Clint would wind up sitting across a table from Sitwell, with Phil on his flank looking disappointed, and quite likely hurt and angry into the bargain.

Clint rubbed his mouth and tried to loosen his shoulders. It had taken him almost a year after Natasha had kicked Loki out of his head to get things more or less back to normal between him and Phil. He wasn’t going to fuck things up over a few pictures.

Phil had put up a good front, said all the right words about it not being Clint’s fault, but there had been a distance between them that hadn’t been there the day before that door had opened and let a monster through. It hadn’t been resentful, or angry, or personal. That, Clint could have dealt with. It would have hurt, but he’d have known how to defuse it; he was an old hand at that. But no. It had been cold and sad and quiet, and Clint hadn’t had any idea how to bridge it, so he’d done what he was trained to do: wait it out and watch for a change. Eventually Phil had warmed back up, had gone back to smiling at him and joining him and Nat and Bobbi for drinks after successful missions. Clint would be damned if he’d go back to that emotional lockdown just because a kid couldn’t tell when a joke spiraling out of control.

The voucher crinkled when the phone shifted against it, and Clint sighed. He had better things to do than mope over Phil, anyway. One day left, and the only thing he’d been able to manage since he’d talked to Jess was to eliminate the possibility of every single person on his original list having sneaked into his room while Phil was gone. If he didn’t figure out some way to persuade Jess to take pity on him, he was either going to miss a golden opportunity to connect with someone he actually had a chance with or look like an idiot by taking over a month to track them down.

His phone buzzed, the rattle as surefire a warning as any given by a snake’s shaking tail. This time it was a picture of Phil in the gym, covered in sweat, his limbs loose with fatigue but his face glowing. The angle made it clear it was from a security camera, and Clint looked away. What the hell was that girl even doing awake at this hour? When Clint had been her age, it had taken a crowbar and a pack of M-80s to get him out of bed before nine. After a moment, Clint’s eyes found the screen a second time, traced the curve of Phil’s shoulders and arms, drank in the flush on his cheeks and chest. Clint counted to ten and deleted the picture.

He needed to talk to Skye about it now, or the girl was going to accomplish what aliens and rampaging robots and his own bad luck had so far failed, and kill him dead.

A quick check of the flying clubhouse that ferried Phil’s crew around when they weren’t playing backup for the Avengers revealed a long-suffering Agent May and netted him an unnerving, seemingly-impromptu lecture on squirrel communication from Simmons. She looked like she’d been up all night, and the mess of schematics and parts scattered around the workshop added to the impression.

“Do you want to see the robot we built to test out theories?” she asked. Clint glanced at May, who shook her head slowly but firmly, telegraphing the movement so Simmons wouldn’t pick up on it but he couldn’t possibly miss her meaning. He wondered if this was how city-smashing killbots started life, in some other lab with some other wide-eyed tech with bright ideas, and he edged a little closer to the exit while Simmons watched him, waiting for an answer.

“Ah, maybe later,” Clint offered. May covered her eyes and looked like she was giving in to the inevitable, and Simmons looked at him like she’d just won the lottery. “Right now I’m looking for Skye?”

“Oh, she’s in her room. She had some research she needed to do for the case we’re working now, and the robot was ‘disrupting her process,’” Simmons told him cheerfully. “When you find her, could you let her know I adjusted the volume controls and fixed the gyro problem that was making it pitch itself off the table every time its tail moves? So if she wants to come back, she won’t have to deal with ‘screaming ninja doom-squirrels’ anymore.”

“That is good to know,” Clint said hesitantly. He looked back to May, who mouthed ‘go’ at him, and beat a hasty retreat.

Clint gritted his teeth when his phone buzzed a third time, silently promising himself that whatever new still Skye had found that somehow went straight to his cock without being even remotely provocative would be deleted unviewed. He unlocked the screen and deflated. It wasn’t Skye. Phil had texted, asking if Clint had time to meet and discuss a personal matter. He closed his eyes for a second and wondered if the universe was out to get him specifically. 

Of course Phil wanted to schedule an appointment to discuss personal matters less than twelve hours after Clint had rubbed one out to the thought of Phil being interested in him, with the assistance of a black-and-white mission photo from five years ago. Of course Phil wanted to schedule an appointment to discuss personal matters less than twenty-four hours after Clint had been moaning loudly in a semi-public space about his failure to locate the person who’d given him a note promising oral sex and Jess’s refusal to help. It was perfect timing. Maybe they could invite Tony to referee, and Skye could simulcast it right onto Steve and Hope’s commlinks for good measure.

Clint took a deep breath and counted to ten. It wasn’t that he was exactly in the habit of getting off to pictures of Phil. But Clint hadn’t been able to shake a vague hope, given unnatural and bullheaded tenacity by Tony’s insistence that Phil thought Clint was special, and it had wormed its way into his subconscious and gotten his dick in on the act. And it wasn’t like he’d been in the middle of a crowd when he’d been complaining about Jess holding out on him. He was probably safe, and he was probably jumping to conclusions. It was just because his brain sometimes decided that it hated him that it had helpfully supplied the possibility that Phil had found out about the note or the pictures or the crush. 

Except. 

Clint reread the text and ran through a list of on-base sites where he’d talked the voucher over with Bobbi and Natasha, where Scott had demanded updates at the top of his lungs, where Steve had been given increasingly flimsy excuses for Bobbi’s giggling and Sharon’s measuring glances had become increasingly dubious. It was lengthy, and Clint could practically hear Hill explaining that certain agents, who if officially discovered would need to be written up and reminded that the sexual harassment seminars weren’t meant as how-tos, needed to be brought to heel, if Phil could possibly squeeze it into his busy schedule. Phil’s pinched expression when he promised to take care of it would be one Clint had seen too many times.

“Kind of busy this week, maybe Monday?” he texted back, crossing his fingers.

The reply was almost immediate. “Sooner would be better.”

Clint stared at his phone and cursed. The gentle insistence was a bad sign. The instantaneous response was a worse one.

“This afternoon?”

“1415, my office.”

Clint could feel a headache germinating in the base of his skull. Maybe if he was lucky he’d fall off a roof before lunch. Clint snapped his fingers. He’d talk to Skye, get her to knock it off with the pics, explain that she shouldn’t be combing through the security system at all, and then he’d ask Simmons to put the robo-squirrel through its paces. When the inevitable catastrophic failure happened, he could fake his way into medical and wait for whoever had left him the first note to show up with, at the very least, a round of condolences, and then swear them to secrecy. Clint could play it off like a practice mole-hunt or something when Phil brought it up.

There was no getting out of the meeting with Phil, but Clint could at least postpone it and have a better excuse for his shenanigans once it got rescheduled. It was the perfect plan, and if it wasn’t, at least he wouldn’t have to face Phil realizing that his confidence in Clint was misplaced for another few days.

*****

Skye answered her door on the second knock, and Clint’s carefully-constructed serious-adult face dissolved into a slack-jawed gape.

“Um.” He tried to make sense of the near floor-to-ceiling collage of maps, pictures, and article clippings covering her room. At least now he knew how she was up at that hour. She clearly hadn’t gone to bed in the first place. “Are you, uh, feeling okay, champ?”

“Oh, hi, Clint,” Skye said. She cracked her neck and stretched. “Welcome to the nerve center of Operation Squirrel Girl.”

“That’s...” Clint gave up. “Okay, _what_?”

At least it looked like Simmons’s sudden case of squirrel-fever wasn’t quite as random as it had seemed at first blush, he thought. He wasn’t sure if it was more or less comforting that the rest of the team seemed to be in on it.

“There’s a new superhero who commands squirrels, or can talk to squirrels, or something along those lines. Coulson said I get to be the one to make contact if I find her. So.” Skye raised her arms and spun around, inviting him to bask in the information she’d put together. “Operation Squirrel Girl!”

“How do you know she’s a superhero?” Clint asked. If there was even a non-zero chance this wasn’t some elaborate prank, that seemed like the place to begin.

“Have you met squirrels?” Skye asked. “Trust me, if she was a villain, we’d know by now.”

“This is kind of analog for you, isn’t it?” He followed her into the room and bit his lip when he saw that the mess had extended onto the ceiling in one corner. “I’d have thought maybe a pinterest board or something.”

“And give up using my one get-out-of-a-psych-eval-free card for making a big honking wall of crazy? Fat chance,” she snorted. “You want me to deal you in?” She caught his look and rolled her eyes. “Trust me, you want in on this. It’s going to be so awesome!”

“Yeah, let’s not. I mean, I get the appeal,” Clint lied, “but this seems like more of, you know, a you-guys kind of thing.”

“Fine,” Skye said, crestfallen. She plopped down on her bed and hugged a stuffed squirrel to her chest, resting her chin on its head and pouting at him. “But don’t say I didn’t invite you when it turns out to be the best thing anyone’s found in years and you weren’t a part of the expedition.”

“I promise I’ll never accuse you of not inviting me,” Clint said. “Which, by the way, Simmons fixed her squirrel-bot, so it’s safe it you want to hang out on the jet instead of your lair.”

“She fixed it, or she said she fixed it?” Skye asked. “Because she claimed to have fixed it three times already, but I think she just made it angrier.”

Clint shrugged. “I didn’t see it in action. But she seemed pretty confident.”

“So, what’s up, if you’re not here to help me find and recruit Squirrel Girl, Mistress of Arboreal Rodents?”

Skye wiggled the stuffed squirrel at him, and he rubbed his face. How had this become his life? Not so long ago, the weirdest thing he’d had to deal with on a daily basis were intraoffice rivalries and interdepartmental intrigues and finding someone to take custody of an arrested drug dealer’s herd of pet hippos.

“The pictures of Coulson, Skye,” Clint said. “They’ve gotta stop. And the cctv feeds aren’t RedTube. Trawling through our security system looking for stuff like that’s a no-go. We all have to be able to trust each other, and that kind of thing undermines it in a really fundamental way. Okay?”

“Uh.” She licked her lips and looked down, her smile gone and her cheeks turning pink. “Yeah. Got it. Message received. I’m, um, sorry. I wasn’t.” She hugged the toy to her chest and let her hair fall across her face, and Clint was suddenly, uncomfortably reminded of what it had been like to be so goddamned young. “I wasn’t thinking about it like that.”

“Just don’t let it happen again, okay?” Clint said gently.

“Yeah. Totally. I mean, I totally won’t.” Skye bit her lip and then sucked in a breath. “Um. Can I give you one last one? It’s not from the security system. I found it on Agent Sitwell’s hard drive after that hellhound-looking fire-monster melted his laptop and he asked me to see if anything was salvageable. I was saving it for your birthday, I figured I’d put it in a real frame or something, but…”

She shook her head and tossed the squirrel aside. She lifted a gallon-sized plastic bin filled with neatly folded paper squares, hand-labeled “WWACD?”, and pulled an envelope out from underneath it. She handed it to him, still avoiding his eyes.

“…that might not be so great if you don’t want it,” she finished. “I really am sorry, Clint. I didn’t mean to weird you out or creepshot anyone.”

He opened the envelope and pulled out the lone 5x7 inside. Natasha’s graduation ceremony, when she’d officially become a full-fledged SHIELD agent. Clint had been allowed to present her official paperwork to her, with her signed and sealed pardon and her new identification included, and they were near the center of the dais. Phil was in the audience, watching them both with a look of undisguised pride and affection on his face.

Back when it had just been their little band of spooks saving the world from normal geopolitical bullshit, before gods and monsters and aliens had come calling. Clint had been so buzzed off Natasha’s accomplishment, her acceptance, the idea that they were going to go fight bad guys together that he barely remembered most of the event. And there was Phil off to the side, just beaming at them.

“I guess Sitwell was the unofficial photographer for the night,” Skye said quietly. “That one jumped out at me when I was testing the recovered data. I thought you might want a copy.”

“Yeah,” Clint managed. His voice was rough, and it was hard to keep his hold on the picture loose enough not to damage the paper. “Thank you. This is.” He took a breath and tried to compose himself. “Thank you. Nat’ll want a copy, too, I think.”

“I got her a different one, but sure. I mean, it’s the same night, but it’s a different picture. It seemed more appropriate for her.” Skye ran her fingers through her hair and shot him a fleeting, searching look. “Are we good? Do you need some, like, space for a while?”

“We’re fine, Skye,” he said, forcing some of the tension out of his frame. She needed to see him as not-angry, he knew that much from being on the other side of similar lectures. “It needed to be addressed, it’s been addressed, you’re taking it seriously. We’re good.”

Her shoulders slumped in relief, and Clint stifled a wince of empathy. He remembered that stripe of uncertainty, that kick-start adrenaline response wrecking any shot of realistically assessing how bad a screw-up objectively was. It had taken him three years to internalize the possibility that SHIELD wasn’t going to throw him out on his ass every time he got put on report for something, no matter how many times Phil assured him that wasn’t how things worked. 

Skye seemed to be doing better than he had, but there was only so fast anyone could unlearn something their whole life had gone into teaching them. There had never been any rhyme or reason to losing her home before, and it would be hard to talk her brain into believing that wasn’t the case anymore. There were days when Clint wasn’t sure he’d talked his own brain into believing it.

“Do you want a hug?” he asked. Her answer was practically a tackle, brief and sudden and tight. “Oof!”

Skye let go and stepped back, then rubbed at one eye and gave him an apologetic look.

“Sorry.” She glanced at the plastic jar, remorseful. “There’s probably a ‘No injuring people with hugs’ one in there, too.”

“What would Agent Coulson do?” he hazarded.

“Jessica made it for me,” Skye said, nodding. “She says it’s all the stuff he told her when she was first trying to get her life together. At least, the stuff that helped, not stuff like the difference between a half windsor and a double windsor, which I have to assume she asked because I don’t see him just telling her.” Her lips twisted. “‘Apologize and try to make amends when you mess up’ is definitely in there somewhere.”

Clint took a closer look at the bin and chuckled at the thought of Jess giving the new kid a grab-bag of life advice from a guy who probably knew how to darn a sock. 

Skye nudged him. “Go for it. You know you want to.”

Clint twisted the lid and picked out a piece of paper. It was in crisp quarter folds, and he had a sense of déjà vu when he opened it. Rich black ink on creamy paper. The text inside read ‘No. 10: Decide what you want to eat before you get in the mess line.’ in Jess’s sharp, slanting script. Clint ran his fingertips over the texture of the paper and swallowed.

“Apparently she tended to hold everybody up,” Skye said, her smile going lopsided. “I guess not the worst advice anybody ever got?”

“Yeah, no, it isn’t.” Clint refolded the paper and dropped it back in the bin. “Sorry to emote and run on you, kid, but I think I’m about to be late for something.”

She flushed and cocked her head. “Don’t let me keep you. And don’t worry. No more pics, hacker’s honor.”

Clint squeezed her shoulder, then half-ran to Jess’s quarters, his mind spinning. Same ink, same paper, and she’d stood in front of him and told him to his face she hadn’t made the voucher.

Jess was on her way out the door when he got there, her arms full of beanie babies.

“Target practice,” she explained, misinterpreting the look on his face. “Apparently I might have to web a bunch of squirrels in the near future. Because I decided that I just had to be a superhero when I grew up”

“You said you didn’t leave the note,” he hissed.

“Oh, for the love of god, Clint. It’s too early in the morning for your bullshit.” Jess glared from him to her now-closed door and jerked her head at it. “Back inside.”

Clint opened the door for her and followed her in.

She flung the toys on her desk before turning to face him. “You better have a damn good reason if you’re going to call me a liar to my face, Barton.”

“That big jar of tips you made for Skye,” Clint said tightly, crossing his arms. “Same paper. Same ink. How long were you planning to let me believe you, Jess?”

“Yeah, no shit, Sherlock. Same ink and same paper.” Jess scowled at him. “You want to know why? Give me that list.”

Clint handed it to her almost defiantly. Jess had convoluted justifications for almost everything she pulled, but she wasn’t much of a liar. She huffed at the look on his face and started rooting around in her desk drawers.

“What are you looking for?” he asked.

“A highlighter, because I know I don’t have any strobe lights or air horns in here,” she retorted. She found one. “Ha!”

She flicked the cap off with her thumb and paid no attention to where it landed, then scrawled a series of overlapping lines onto the page before shoving it back at him. Clint stared at the thick stripe of yellow over Phil’s name.

“I don’t--”

“Skye was--well, maybe still is, but definitely was--having some of the same problems as I did when I first gave it a go with SHIELD,” Jess explained, her voice tight with anger. “And you know, it’s strange, but one of the things that really kept me plugging away at maybe trying for ‘human being’ instead of ‘freakshow science experiment meant for world domination’ was Coulson and his stupid little rulebook with all its stupid little rules for how to fit in with normal people. So I thought, she could probably use something to perk her up and make her feel a little less alone, right? Everyone else she’s rolling with knows the score, they went out of their way to be here. So I swiped a bunch of Coulson’s pens, and a couple of those fancypants notebooks he’s always using--things that you’ve been watching him use for longer than I have, by the way--and I made her a little Agent-in-a-Jar, for when no one was around to make her feel like less of a reject or a project or a misfit. And that, _Clint_ , is why Skye’s big bin of tips is full of the same paper as that stupid fucking note.”

Clint tried to find something to say, but his mind seemed to be stuck in neutral, the centers of his brain usually responsible for cogent thought circling around the highlighted name on the list Phil had given him.

“And believe me,” Jess continued, throwing her hands up, “believe me, I have no idea what fit of temporary insanity or sleep-dep psychosis or ergot poisoning led to you getting that note. None. Maybe he finally cracked after watching you almost get yourself killed for the thousandth time, maybe the nurses had to sedate him and he got sentimental. Maybe you broke down and finally said something instead of just jerking it to borderline-inappropriate mission-based upskirts.”

“That’s not--”

“I don’t know, and you know what? I don’t really care.” Jess poked him in the chest, and he backed into the wall. “The point is that, for whatever reason, he sat there next to your hospital bed for the millionth time, only this time he drew you a picture and told you he was down. And you spent the last month missing every last possible thing that should have been pointing you right at him because…?”

Clint swallowed and waited for her to explain what suddenly seemed inexplicable.

“Because…?” she repeated, her eyes narrowing.

“Just say it, Jess,” he said quietly.

She stepped back as if she’d been stung and swore at him. She kept swearing and started pacing the room like a cat stalking a songbird it couldn’t quite reach, and Clint tried to ignore the goosebumps it raised on his arms.

“I’m actually asking you,” she said after she’d calmed down a notch or two and stopped pacing. “I’m literally at a loss as to why you do half the shit you do to yourself. You had a list in your hand where you’d crossed everyone off but him. If it had been anyone else in this situation, you’d have been the one with the highlighter. But here I am, watching the gears clicking away inside your head while you try to figure out if I’m screwing with you. I mean, he fucking loves you, and you’ve clearly got a thing for him, and you’re staring at me like I can explain why you’re still here and not trying to beat the deadline to cash that goddamned thing in.”

“He doesn’t, though,” Clint said. “I mean, you’ve met me.” He looked down and wrapped his fingers around the nape of his neck. “There’s no way.”

“Yeah, well, maybe tell him that. In fact, it would probably be easiest for everyone if you two could meet up and trade information,” Jess snapped. “You could let him know he’s not in love with you, he could give you the same presentation I had to sit through about you not being into him, and the rest of us will be spared the coal-slurry landslide that any relationship you two have is guaranteed to be.” She leaned back against the wall, her anger finally spent. “I mean, Jesus, Clint, you know what some of us would give to have someone who looks at us like he looks at you and know it’s real? Just let yourself have this.”

“Wait, you sat through a presentation about how I’m not into him?” Clint said.

“Well, you see, _he_ never gave up on me having what it took to be a hero, even when I couldn’t properly control my pheromone powers, and _you_ fucked my girlfriend and then couldn’t be bothered to apologize for like a decade,” Jess pointed out. “So who do you think got the first come-to-Jesus lecture after you busted in here waving your embarrassing blowjob ration-card in my face?”

Clint could feel the blood draining from his face. “You didn’t.”

“I totally did,” Jess said. “So you can either go talk to him, or I can gently break the news that he was right about you not wanting him after all.” 

She stretched, then did a backbend with a roll-through that left her crouching halfway up the wall. Clint stared at her, speechless, and she steepled her fingers thoughtfully.

“If it’s any comfort, I can make up a reason for it that’ll make him feel way better about dodging the bullet,” she offered, her smile ruthless. “Like maybe you and Bobbi have finally leveled up in Fuck, Marry, Kill.”

Clint started, sudden realization hitting home like a bolt. He’d already had that conversation with Phil, hadn’t he? Clint had sat there, blithely talking about how great his relationship with Bobbi was going right now. There was no way Phil wouldn’t believe Jess if she went to him and started telling him how they were going to get engaged any minute.

“You’re horrible sometimes, you know that?” he breathed.

“Effective,” Jess corrected. “The word you’re looking for is effective.”

“Jesus.” Clint ran his fingers through his hair. “Phil left me that note.”

“Yup.” Jess hopped down and started scooping the toys back off her desk, into a bag this time. “Feel free to go have your romantic meltdown at someone who you didn’t basically accuse of lying because you’re an idiot, and who isn’t going to be stuck in a Syfy Original before the week’s out if a pack of government-issue tryhards have their way. Because this someone is completely not in the mood right now.”

“I’m sorry,” Clint muttered, pushing himself off the wall. “It seemed like--I don’t know, not _reasonable_ , I guess, but logical? There didn’t seem to be anyone else, so I came up with what I thought was the right answer.”

“Well, it wasn’t.” Jess herded him out of the room and pulled the door shut behind them. “Also? You’ve got like maybe ten hours before I’m having dinner with him, so I’d put wheels on it if I were you.”

“You’re having dinner with him?” Clint asked. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know, but grasping at straws was all he was capable of at the moment.

“I still don’t understand Valentine’s Day that well,” she said. “We’re reviewing it. It’s a working dinner.”

“You could have just said it was none of my business,” Clint sighed.

“Yeah, walking away now,” Jess said, slinging the bag over her shoulder. “Try not to give yourself an aneurysm figuring it out.”


	7. Chapter 7

Clint watched the clouds scull by, blown by a wind that didn’t reach the ground. They were wispy, blousy things, intensely white and ragged at the edges, pretty against the blue of the sky. It was a gorgeous day, and he wondered what would happen if he just stayed out here on the green instead of keeping his appointment with Phil. A text? A phone call? Would Phil come looking for him?

He felt like some fundamental law of the universe had been broken, like he was a cartoon character who’d run out of ground, realized it, and then somehow not fallen. Everything that had happened, and Phil was somehow still attracted to him. Phil wanted him just like he wanted Phil. Phil was aware that Clint wanted him, had been willing to humor it to a certain extent. After two seconds’ thought, Clint was absolutely positive that he’d been the one to bring it up, that Phil hadn’t and wouldn’t proposition him, especially while he was hopped up on painkillers.

Clint closed his eyes and replayed the conversation about the list, the one he’d been so ready to flee that he’d practically had one foot out the door the entire time. Phil had been waiting for him to bring up the voucher. It was obvious in retrospect, with all the pieces of the puzzle. Phil had been waiting for him to say something about it, and then had given him an honest answer when Clint had asked who’d been in his room. He could hardly expect Phil to deny it now, with Jess on a tear about it, if Clint asked him point blank. 

He was also sure that if he didn’t say something, Phil would let it go. It would be a closed case, filed away and never to be revisited. It would turn into something that had happened and that they were ignoring by mutual agreement, a less bureaucracy-intensive version of his and Bobbi’s mayfly-brief marriage. All Clint had to do to wipe it off the face of the earth was fail to act.

He dug the voucher out of his pocket and read through it. The paper was growing soft from handling, but the drawings and text were still clear enough. This was not a thing Phil would have made purely as a joke. This wasn’t something that Phil would have spent the time drawing just to mess with him. It even had Steve’s first shield--his Captain America USO vaudeville prop--on it, now that Clint knew what he was looking at. He was sure it hadn’t been done entirely in earnest; nobody, especially Phil, actually walked around handing out rain checks for sex. But the sentiment behind it must have been real enough.

And how many times had Clint imagined sweeping everything off Phil’s ridiculously tidy desk and fucking him on it? How many times had Clint imagined Phil sweeping everything off his ridiculously tidy desk, dragging Clint across it, and making him come until he couldn’t breathe? How many times had Clint wondered what Phil would do if Clint leaned into him, kissed him, held him close? What it would feel like if Phil’s hands just rested on him, warm and comforting, when Phil was done patching him up or checking for injuries? 

Clint traced the ‘issuing agent’ part of the text with his thumbnail and wondered if Jess had a point. Why was he doing this to himself?

It was one thing to nurse a crush he was sure could never be reciprocated. If he was perpetually ready to fall back into bed with a woman he knew in his bones he couldn’t ever keep, he couldn’t fault himself for getting off to fantasies of a man he couldn’t ever have. But if he could literally walk into Phil’s office in an hour, hand over the note, and ask if there was a substitution policy for dinner and a movie? If he could get a yes instead of a marginally horrified lecture on professional boundaries? If their working relationship could survive him bringing Natasha in against orders, the unmitigated clusterfuck that Budapest had been, the ease and thoroughness with which Loki had broken him, it could survive him asking Phil on a date. 

So what was stopping him?

Clint stared up at the clouds, folded the note carefully, and clasped his hands over his chest.

“Absolutely nothing,” he murmured to himself, a smile tugging at his lips.

*****

Phil tapped his pen against the desk and looked at the clock. Two minutes past the last time he’d checked it. He tried to focus on the recurring-expense reports on the dimmed screen of his tablet. He touched the glass, and the device brightened. Five minutes until his meeting with Clint, five minutes until he made a clean breast of it and hoped for the best. And that assumed Clint turned up on time, or turned up at all. He didn’t blow off meetings often, but Phil had made sure Clint knew it was to discuss personal matters, and if there was one thing Clint still hadn’t entirely mastered his discomfort with, it was that. Phil hadn’t wanted him to feel any more ambushed than was already likely, but now he wondered if it had been a mistake, the latest in a series of them.

He turned the tablet off, plugged it in, and stowed it in a drawer. He wasn’t going to get any real work done in the next five minutes, and he knew it. The only thing of use he’d finished in the last hour had been the travel-plan authorization for Skye’s trip to LA, and Phil wasn’t entirely sure that counted. What had started as an interesting milk run to motivate her and give his frazzled team a small break was beginning to seem like the second-worst idea he’d had this month. If anything, Melinda might have been underselling the squirrel-bot’s potential as a threat.

Phil rubbed his face and tried not to think about the ways in which this meeting could go wrong. Clint was an adult. Clint had proven resilient. Clint was happily paired off with Bobbi at the moment, which would doubtless make him slightly more forgiving of any perceived romantic slights. Clint didn’t report to him anymore, which lowered the stakes immeasurably. If this went badly, they could avoid each other until the anger or pain or sheer awkwardness had subsided through the natural action of distance and time. It had worked after the Chitauri invasion, when Clint had kept himself at arm’s length during Phil’s rehab; it would work on this, if it had to. 

Phil’s lips twisted at the memory. He’d tried to be grateful for Clint’s reserve at the time. In his clearer, more rational moments, Phil had even managed to do it. He’d been in too much pain, too rattled by the Council’s decision to nuke an unevacuated metropolis, and too raw in his relief at getting Clint back whole and sound to keep a lid on things easily. Phil was sure if Clint had kept closer, he would have cracked and said something he shouldn’t have, put enough pressure on a bond that was already strained to break it beyond repair. But the sudden coolness from Clint had still been painful.

Phil knew it hadn’t been fair to expect things to be business as usual after everyone had been through hell and back, when everyone was still trying to adjust to a world in which the rules had been painted over in bold, lurid, terrifying strokes. Natasha had kept closer, Bobbi had asked for a transfer out of undercover work and onto the strike team. Melinda had accepted her transfer from the analyst pool back onto the field roster, for all that she hadn’t been happy about it. Clint had been present, of course, but he’d been a shadow, watching from the back of the crowd or the corner of the room or from a remote catwalk where he could observe without being expected to participate. It had registered like an absence, for all that he was there.

Phil didn’t want to go back to that, but if it came down to it, they’d obviously both survived it.

The soft knock on his door came sooner than he wanted. Phil shook himself. At least Clint wasn’t late, or skipping out on him altogether, even if he was wearing a dazzling smile Phil didn’t want to be responsible for wiping off his face.

“Thank you for coming,” Phil said, gesturing to the chairs on the other side of the desk. A pro forma invitation; Clint had never once waited to be asked before sitting down in his office. “I know you’re busy. I’ll try to keep this brief.”

“I was hoping to clear something up first, if you don’t mind?”

Clint licked his lips and blushed faintly, and Phil felt slightly more forgiving of whatever fit of bad judgment had seized him at Clint’s bedside. The man was beautiful, and there were limits to Phil’s capacity for self-denial. He couldn’t entirely blame himself for wanting.

Phil realized Clint was waiting for Phil to respond instead of just barreling ahead, a departure from Clint’s usual form.

“Of course,” Phil blurted. There was no high ground to lose. He could hardly deny Clint the opportunity to preempt Phil’s agenda when it consisted of an admission of unprofessional and borderline unethical conduct.

Clint pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket, unfolded it, and smoothed it out on the desk, his eyes never leaving Phil’s face. He looked hopeful, heartbreakingly so, and Phil stared at him, utterly mystified.

“Well, sir?”

Phil tried to reconcile Clint’s expression with the laundry receipt on his desk and failed. He had a sharp flashback to the time Nick had dumped a shoebox full of Jasper’s expense-accounted betting slips, every last one filled out with a long-shot superfecta, on a table and demanded to know what sort of lunatic they were dealing with. Some people dealt with stress in unusual ways and at inopportune times.

“You’re very happy with Express Cleaning Solution’s service?” Phil asked weakly.

Clint’s brows furrowed, and he glanced down. His eyes widened, and he started emptying his pockets frantically before he found what he’d been looking for inside his vest. Phil felt like an idiot once he realized what Clint was trying to show him. Of course.

“Can we just pretend I didn’t start this conversation with a dry-cleaning bill?” Clint sighed.

“I feel that, under the circumstances, it’s the least I can do,” Phil told him.

“Are you really--I mean, this isn’t completely off the table, is it?” Clint asked haltingly. “I assume the little money order thing is a joke, but if I asked you out on a date, there’s a chance you’d say yes?”

Phil blinked. The hope in Clint’s voice had not been what he was expecting. Clint was jittery and nervous but seemed essentially pleased; there was certainly no hint of the recrimination Phil had anticipated. The sudden relief was almost enough to unstring him, however well he’d thought himself prepared for the conversation.

“If you asked me out on a date, I would say yes,” Phil said, nodding carefully. “But I thought you and Bobbi were back together?”

Clint snorted ruefully. “We’re back to being friends instead of frenemies.” He straightened his shoulders and took a quick breath. “So, um. This is me asking you. On a date.”

“Did you have anything particular in mind?”

Phil wondered at how calm his voice sounded. Was this what happened after decades of defusing bombs and reining in dangerous tech and handing out benign cover stories after reality had been rearranged? Had he simply lost the capacity to sound like he was in shock? Clint was sitting across the desk from him, grinning like he’d just won the lottery, and Phil was somehow not repeatedly asking if Clint was serious. 

Clint hadn’t been teasing him, the night that had started all this. Clint had been interested. Phil tamped down the urge to tell Clint the voucher wasn’t as much of a joke as he seemed to think it was, to act before the inevitable happened and Clint realized he could do so much better, to steer this dream in a more interesting direction before Phil woke up alone on the sofa to the sound of his phone’s alarm.

“Honestly, my roadmap ends at you saying yes, because it only occurred to me in the last few hours that you might really agree to it,” Clint said. “Are you okay? You look a little, uh, pole-axed.”

“I’m still adjusting to the idea that you might really want to go on a date,” Phil said, smiling thinly. “I wanted to explain.” He gestured at the note. “And apologize. I hadn’t meant to embarrass or alarm you.”

“Well, there was pretty much zero alarm, except when I thought Jess might have done it as a nefarious revenge scheme, and I think I might have had a lot of the embarrassment coming.” Clint picked at the edge of the voucher. “What’s that Holmes quote you always went for whenever I was yelling about something being impossible? And I spent damn near a whole month completely ignoring the obvious. I just, you know--I didn’t think I’d ever gotten your attention.”

Phil rubbed his jaw and watched Clint’s fingers trace the olive-branch filigree on the page. A thrill ran down his spine at the sight, and he swallowed. “I can safely say you’ve had my attention for a very long time, Clint.”

“Long enough to maybe cash this in tonight?” Clint asked, the corner of his mouth twitching up in a way that left Phil unable to think of much beyond kissing him.

“Long enough that you could cash it in now, if you wanted,” Phil said softly.

Clint blinked at him, his jaw falling open, and then he cast a sly look at the desk between them. “Hypothetically speaking, is there anything on here that you’d be super-upset about winding up on the floor?”

“I think the pens and blotter could survive a fall,” Phil breathed.

Clint grinned, his eyes gleaming, and swept the desk clean with one forearm. His other hand reached out, twisted gently in Phil’s shirt, and drew him slowly and irresistibly across the expanse until their lips met.

It wasn’t love. Phil knew that. He wasn’t twenty-five and running on black coffee and adrenaline and faith. He knew better than to call it love.

But it certainly felt like it when his fingers found the back of Clint’s neck and ran through his hair, and Clint’s mouth opened under his kiss, and Clint pulled him onto the desk and held him close. He could feel himself melting when Clint pushed him down, straddled him, and kissed him again, every line of his body taut and every touch careful. Clint sucked in a sharp breath when Phil tugged his shirt out of his waistband and ran his hands over Clint’s narrow waist. When Phil’s fingertips found the dip of his spine and followed it up until his palms were sliding over the well-muscled jut of his shoulder blades, Clint shoved his tongue against Phil’s and moaned into his mouth.

Clint straightened suddenly, pulled his shirt off over his head, and tossed it over the couch. Phil stared at him, dazed and wanting and drinking in every last detail of what Clint looked like when he was kneeling over him, dark-eyed and half-naked. Clint was beautiful in spite of the scars he’d picked up along the way, gentle in spite of the violence of which he was capable. Phil’s cock was thickening already, and the way Clint shifted his hips when he bent down to fit himself back into the curve of Phil’s body told him Clint’s was, too. Clint guided Phil’s hands over his skin and lost himself in memorizing Phil’s mouth. 

Phil’s lips were tender by the time he worked a hand between their bodies and stroked gently at Clint’s erection, and Clint bucked against him, his fingers tightening around the edge of the desk until his knuckles went white. Clint lifted his hips and tore at his fly, wrenching the zipper down, and growled when Phil slipped his hand past the waistband and over Clint’s skin. Phil’s fingers closed around Clint’s cock, and he reveled in the heft of it, an iron weight in velvet skin. Clint moaned, low and choking, when Phil stroked gently to gauge his reaction, and Phil couldn’t have asked for a better response.

Clint grabbed Phil’s wrist, a look of concern suddenly on his face. “What if I get come on your shirt in the middle of a shift?”

“Clint, this would hardly be the first time I need to change clothes at work,” Phil murmured. Of all the ludicrous, thoughtful things to occur to Clint at a time like this. “There’s a spare suit in the closet.”

“Oh. Well.” Clint let go and grinned at him, his gaze gone soft and warm. “As you were, then.”

Phil laughed and ran his fingers over Clint’s length, coaxing, exploring. Clint let his forehead rest on Phil’s chest and stifled another moan, his hips jerking when Phil began working in earnest. Clint’s weight pressed him more firmly into the wood as Clint lost himself in it, and Phil tried to keep still as his own cock throbbed at the feel of it, the warmth of Clint’s body, the smell of Clint’s cologne, the sound of Clint’s ragged breathing as he got closer to the edge. Phil was as inventive and nimble as he could manage, one-handed and at an awkward angle, and Clint didn’t seem to mind. Every muscle in his body coiled, tightened, and Phil gasped when Clint’s thigh flexed against him. Clint twisted suddenly, his head thrown back and his face contorted as he tried not to groan aloud, and he came in hot, thick spurts in Phil’s hand.

Clint recovered slowly, panting into Phil’s throat and occasionally shivering as an aftershock rolled through him. Phil extracted a handkerchief from his pocket with some difficulty and cleaned them up as much as he could with Clint still lying half on top of him. After a few long, deliciously languid minutes, Clint propped himself up on one elbow and looked down at him, his eyes roving hungrily over Phil’s body. There was a desperate quality to Clint’s gaze, a frantic look like he was trying to commit everything to memory while he had the chance, and Phil wondered if this was another one of those moments like they’d had that night in the hospital, a temporary suspension of the rules that was about to end.

Instead Clint ran his hand up Phil’s thigh until he found Phil’s cock, and he shuddered when Clint squeezed him through his slacks. Callused fingers undid his fly, slid fabric down over his hips, traced gentle circles over the soft skin where bone gave way to belly. Phil had a second to wonder how he looked to Clint, whose body was a tightly-coiled weapon, before Clint’s lips closed over his cock and he no longer had the capacity to wonder about anything.

Phil wrapped his fingers around Clint’s shoulders and tried to not move, to not thrust. It was more than he could have asked for already, and Clint’s muscles flexed under Phil’s hands every time his head bobbed along Phil’s length. Clint’s tongue moved slowly over his shaft and flicked at his slit and ran fast as quicksilver over his foreskin, and Phil’s blood turned thick and molten in his veins, his nerves lit and his heart hammering in his chest. 

It was too much, too good, and Phil wanted to twist away from it before it overwhelmed him. Clint’s hands were on his hips, though, holding firm as his mouth worked, hot and wet and perfect, to bring Phil to the edge. His breath was harsh in his own ears before long, and he groped his way back to himself from the all-consuming bliss that had turned his vision white at the edges. 

The warm buzz of Phil’s nerves told him he was fast approaching the point of no return, that Clint was too beautiful for him to last long. He ran his hand through Clint’s hair, light and gentle, then bit his lip and arched when another wave of pleasure caught him sideways.

“I’m close,” Phil warned, panting. He felt like he’d been sprinting, and Clint’s weight was all that was keeping him grounded under the intensity of Clint’s mouth. He wrapped his fingers around the edge of the desk and hissed when Clint just redoubled his efforts. When Phil spilled across Clint’s lapping tongue, he felt the sudden pressure of Clint swallowing around his cock, and it was as if his veins were pumping fire instead of blood.

By the time Phil’s heart had slowed to a normal pace, Clint was crawling up to kiss him, and Phil put as much need and tenderness into it as he could, just in case it was the last time Clint let him. Clint tucked himself under Phil’s arm and smirked, one hand still stroking slowly over Phil’s bare hip.

“I was thinking maybe a steakhouse for dinner.” His voice was rough and deep, and Phil shivered at it. “There’s a good one not too far from here, and it’s walking distance from my place, in case we wanted a nightcap.”

“Mmm.” Phil tried to think of an appropriate response, some approval of Clint having an extraction plan, and settled for nodding his assent. He’d worry about things like sentence construction and appropriate workplace boundaries once his brain came back online. “Sounds good.”

“Any chance I can get clearance to fly the quinjet next time we need to go somewhere?” Clint asked casually.

“None whatsoever.”

Clint chuckled and kissed Phil’s temple. “Just making sure you’re really with me, here. I don’t want to waste the favor I’m going to have to call in to get reservations for tonight if you can’t make it after all.”

Phil found Clint’s hand and squeezed it. In another moment, they were going to have to get up, straighten their clothes, and pretend this hadn’t happened until they were in private again.

“Short of an Avengers-level disaster, nothing could keep me away.”

“Oh, man,” Clint groaned, burying his face in Phil’s arm. “I’ve been daydreaming about this for years. Don’t jinx it now.”

Phil squeezed his hand, harder this time, and smiled. “Make the reservations, Clint. I’ll be there.”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Ready, Fire, Address](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8044324) by [Elf (Elfwreck)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elfwreck/pseuds/Elf)




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